Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas...

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.

Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.