You don't just leave Los Angeles. Such a departure requires magical intervention. You can't simply purchase a ticket to another destination. You must disappear.
— Kate Braverman
Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.
If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.
I have a great ability to improvise verbally, and I am very funny on a dime.
Falling in love with landscapes is what L.A. women do. It doesn't necessarily imply betrothal or marriage.
Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.
I've written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it's very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from my eyes and ears.
As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.
There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.
I'm manic-depressive, technically bi-polar II with many borderline features.
