Quotes from Stacey D'Erasmo

There is no such thing as a natural fit between form and content. Seamless elegance would be tantamount to erasure.

In my family, we were on again off again Unitarians, partly because my father, raised Roman Catholic, had had enough of church.

I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority.

The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.

'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.

Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.

A performer needs and craves a live audience.

Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.

For the Supreme Court, the right for everyone to say 'I do' is where the story ends, but for artists, it's where the story just starts to get interesting.

I'm not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges - which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.

'The Girls' tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, who are not only literally but spiritually attached for eternity. Born joined at the head in 1974 to a feckless teenage mother who abandons them, and reared by a delightfully open-minded adoptive couple, the Darlen girls are darling girls, indeed.

Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.

Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely.

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

In my darker moments, I feel like the Queen of England, bound and gagged by reverence. Tin-crowned and irrelevant.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

Reading 'The Third Sex' feels a bit like flying in a veering helicopter over a rain forest that is disappearing before one's eyes.

As for me, I've been in love with women and men. I get how people fall in love with different kinds of people, but to fall in love with God: I didn't get that.

The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arm's length will never do. We want to get closer.

A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.