I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.