Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.
I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.
Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.
Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.
In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.
I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.
I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.
I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.
Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write.
If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.
There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.
