Quotes from Stacey D'Erasmo

A lot of times, really wonderful things that have come my way have come basically out of the blue.

The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.

While 'A Blessed Child' might have been a more tough-minded book had Ullmann thrown a spanner into the works, it's not hard to understand her decision to keep things going.

One of the things I've always loved about queer culture is the openness and passionate curiosity about love, desire and the myriad forms of affectionate ties.

On a deeper level, there's a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there's been a time when there's been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to sort of rebuild that private space.

A touring band is a family and a workplace at the same time, and you're living with people you didn't necessarily choose every day for up to a year.

I don't go online when I'm writing - that's the devil's workshop - but in general, I'm on there as much as any other global citizen.

Historians of European royalty have written of the king's 'two bodies' : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.

As lightly toned by reality as the women on 'Sex and the City,' the bold, soigne characters on 'The L Word' suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the entire world is glowing and delectable.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

The ambition of 'Ten Thousand Saints,' Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master's in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.

We were those girls, the artist's daughters, the mermaids, the ones with long, tangled hair who did what they wanted. Inside, always, we knew we were free." - Stacey D'Erasmo

The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance, imagine the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location.

What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.

In 1976, divorce could still raise eyebrows, as could a woman's decision not to have children. Dyslexia wasn't as commonly recognized then, and thus not treated as it is today.

I don't know if my faith stems from what I'd call unconditional love, but the energy certainly feels boundless.

I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.

That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.