The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong.
I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.
I see friends of mine who have kids and continue to do their art. It's deeply impressive. I can't even fit an Amazon return into the day. It's been sitting on my desk for two weeks.
I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.
'The Chairs are Where the People Go' was told to me by my friend Misha Glouberman; I typed as he talked. In 'How Should a Person Be?' the transcribed dialogues between me and my friends help form the structure of the book.
A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too.
I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties.
An artist's love for what they create is what creates love.
For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.
There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns.
In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear.
No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.
Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.
It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.
We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential.
If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies.
Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors.
I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other, developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They're intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly like normal friendships.
The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait.
There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?