Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Andrea Schulz became my editor in 2009.
A woman's desire is either terrifying, or it's ignored.
The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.
Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
Fate and history have a similar feeling. They are weird mirrors to each other.
It is expensive to live in hotels, even cheap ones - more expensive than renting.
Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.
I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.
Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.
My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.
One of the things that's really important in 'Queen of the Night' is how people communicate with their clothes.
With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
I had been in a professional boys' choir, and as a boy soprano, you're aware that your voice has an expiration date.
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!
When I left the state of Maine for college, I met my first really rich friends, and I discovered summer could be a verb.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass - Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman.
When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.
I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
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.
If you compromise, and then you succeed, that's another kind of feeling. But if you compromise and fail, it's two failures at least.
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.
By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'
Marie Cornelie Falcon, who lost her voice while performing - singing the line 'Je suis pret' - 'I am ready.' How much more tragic can you get?
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.
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 drive.
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 my way out.
I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.
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, failure, and success.
I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).
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 dictate, was interesting to me.
Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.
I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.
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 your costume a little of a killer's heart.
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 writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.
The best relatively contemporary portrayal of a courtesan that I've ever seen was probably in 'Children of Paradise,' a film that was made during the Nazi occupation of France, made in secret actually.
I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.
The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.
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 limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.
Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.
Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the 'rusticators,' as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors.
I loved being a soprano. It was one of my very favorite things in life, and thus far, and losing that voice was a profound emotional moment for me in my life. I never became that interested in my adult male singing voice.
In some ways, in 'The Queen of the Night,' I'm writing about some of the experience that I had with 'Edinburgh' where I was entirely unable to speak about what had happened to me as a child, but I could read from the novel.
The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.