Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.