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

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

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

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

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.

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

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.