I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.

I like people, I really do. I like meeting people. But most of the time I would rather be at home reading a book than reading in a bookstore. It's a performance, and it ends up being all right, and then you have a nice shot of bourbon afterwards, and it's all good. I want to please people. I want to be nice. I want to be liked. As a result I say yes to everything. But it takes a lot of vital energy out of me.

I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

I'm always hungry for people.

The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.