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

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.

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'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.

I think it's very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic - though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this.

When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.

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.