Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

I wrote a novel called "Blonde," which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.