My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.

Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.

I am one Dana when I am talking to my daughter, another when I am talking to the IRS, and another still when I do an interview. These characters are just extreme versions of ordinary human self-switching.

If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life.