Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read..

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel..

The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights..

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without….

Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the din….

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you..

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the st….

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine..

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard dr….

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA..

I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction wri….

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity….

One of my big inspirations was Céleste Mogador. She was a courtesan who wrote her memoirs in order to pay off her debts, which is a hilarious gesture..

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change….

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them..

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could di….

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from..

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find ….

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside ….

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with….