I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.

What I've found as I have kept writing stories is that more and more your way is barred. I feel really choked by what I already know how to do, by the fact that my obsessions nearly always mount a sneak attack, so that I find myself writing another version of the same thing.

I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.

You don't really have a story until you discover the moment when the pressures on a character force a sudden, abrupt shift in direction and she falls through the net that has so far held her in place.

It's hard to write sex because it's hard to write desire, period.

For me, what's compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray us or rescue us by insisting on their own non-negotiable truths. Anything but frank or pragmatic.

You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.