Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catast…

- Jim Shepard

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

- Jim Shepard

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

- Jim Shepard

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours …

- Jim Shepard

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

- Jim Shepard

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experi…

- Jim Shepard

Empathy is a human trait. But lots of humans exercise some traits more energetically than others. By "the usefulness of empathy" I mean the way in wh…

- Jim Shepard

Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly re…

- Jim Shepard

I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of…

- Jim Shepard