I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.