Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.

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.

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

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!

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

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