It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

Proust is a huge author for me.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

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.