When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.
A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.
While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.
I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.
When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.
My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.
I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.
L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.
As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.