Ask anyone who makes a full-length movie that's shown in the art world if they'd rather have a career as a film director or as an artist. Invariably, they'd rather be known as a film director, because that's what they are. But there's not really a system of independent distribution anymore that allows for that, and so the art world has kind of become all-enveloping. It's absorbed all of these disciplines that don't have a home anymore.

Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?

Nothing's ever entirely new. It's more a matter of what gets picked up from the past at each time.

I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.

No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

I think writers always want to be taken seriously as writers, but it's not always possible. There's a difference between persistence and banging your head against the same wall a hundred times. Sometimes it's better to look away from the wall and see what else might be available that's easier.