Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.
— Janet Fitch
The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.
When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.
My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
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.
My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.
I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.
For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.
It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.
You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.
My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.
I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.
It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.
I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.
A book's flaws make it less predictable.
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.
I just wanted to live in books and in movies.
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.
I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.
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.
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
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.
I'd rather see a writer write 15 minutes a day than save it all up for a Saturday. A work gets a coating on it when it's not been worked on for a while, makes it hard to break back in.
I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.
Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.
I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.
My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.
As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.
Women writers specifically... are the ultimate outsiders.
Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.
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.
I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.
My mother had been a solitary chef. It was her recreation and her escape.
I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.
Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.
I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
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.
My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.
I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.
A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.
As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.
