Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.
Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
I will not let my sales figures dictate what I say on the blog, because the blog is what I want to say.
People are worried about their bodies. They're worried about disease. They're worried about how they are able to get out and participate in the world.
The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.
The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.
The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another---it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.
Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.
Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching.
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.
If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say.'
I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I'm around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.
Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.
Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.
I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
