As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.