My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.