Prayer is so complicated.

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

I have never liked the 'Been there done that' thing... You hear that all the time from people, and I think it's just based on pure insecurity... Each person is going to have their own unique take on something.

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there's something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.

For me, everything about the telling is guided by tone. It's a bit mysterious; it's either there, or it isn't.

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can't find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.

The interaction between the two matters, but to me, each doesn't really exist independently of the other, so I'm not ever faced with a situation where the tone is wrong for the story, or the story wrong for the tone. They are two parts of one thing.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.

A novel is not a rant.

I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.

I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis. There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men.

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

We're all performing for someone.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

My parents were hippies.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

Publishing is not my world.

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Success is a completely abstract thing - it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success.

I don't believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.

I think it's basically the same game, although with a public figure like [Donald] Trump I think you are bound to consider the public persona rather than the private one. At least that was the case with that piece of writing.

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.