John E. Walker's Quotes

I was a keen sportsman, and became school captain in soccer and cricket.

In 1960, I went to St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.

In 1995, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist.

These studies resulted eventually in a complete sequence analysis of the complex from several species, and in the atomic resolution structure of the F catalytic domain of the enzyme from bovine mitochondria, giving new insights into how ATP is made in the biological world.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

Fear is... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I'm an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.

If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.

In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling was part of my life. My experience of earthquakes has always been more the fear of them, or the possibility.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.