There Is a Freedom to Being Kept Outside: The Millions Interviews Kate Zambreno

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I believe I write so as to continue to exist, and also to perform disappearance, nonexistence. I write knowing I inevitably shame my family by doing so, by writing at all about an interior life.
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A Kind of Deep Companionship: The Millions Interviews Jo Ann Beard

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When you’re slogging through your day, imagining what else is to come, and you remember that the minute all else is done you can sink down into your book like warm water, and be absorbed while you’re absorbing, is priceless, as they say in capitalism.
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The Tragedy of Self: The Millions Interviews Makenna Goodman

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I like the idea of control, giving the tools back to readers, to see engaging in literature as a practice in interpretation of our own consciousness.
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Writing to Heal: The Millions Interviews Elissa Washuta

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At some point, I got it into my head that I wanted to write a book as long as a Franzen novel, because I know he’s allowed to and the conventional wisdom said I wasn’t.
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Formal Poetry Is Not a Museum Piece: The Millions Interviews Aaron Poochigian

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There was some tension at Columbia over my formalism. I was at one point told not to write that way. Because formal poetry is what lights up my synapses, gets me high, I could not accommodate that suggestion.
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Snapshots of Grit: The Millions Interviews Elle Nash

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Fiction can be a place to change and examine society’s morals and values. It can be a place where we can examine whether or not said values are suffocating, where we can debate what morality actually is.
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Interrogating Girlhood: The Millions Interviews Melissa Febos

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Filtering our selfhood through other eyes is part of living as any kind of marginalized identity—we're conditioned to identify with the dominant group, subjugate parts that don’t fit its ideals, and prioritize its needs over our own.
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Immigrants Behaving Badly: Maria Kuznetsova and Sanjena Sathian in Conversation

I feel like a lot of immigrant lit was serious, but especially lit by women. Men like Gary Shteyngart, they can have more fun. I think some women—not all women, obviously—have this pressure to be more serious.

We Become the Stories We Tell: The Millions Interviews Kirstin Valdez Quade

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Imagine Mary's shock at finding out that, without any say in the matter, she was pregnant. Even if she thought it was an honor to be impregnated by God, I’ve got to think it was a complicated moment for her.
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I Always Write in the Past: The Millions Interviews André Aciman

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In writing truth, the act of writing already changes things, even if you swear the story is factually true.
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Where Was God?: The Millions Interviews Véronique Tadjo

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It is very comforting for a writer to work from the premise of a universal genre. Tales are timeless therefore it is left to the storyteller to adapt them for a new audience.
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A Moose in Maine: Marcia Butler in Conversation with Richard Russo

Music itself creates a space and time where the past and future are suspended—it anchors your entire being to the now. There is no doubt that if I’d not discovered music at age four my life would have played out very differently.

Resisting the Easy Impulse: Te-Ping Chen in Conversation with Brenda Peynado

I also love the way that surreality and exaggeration can work in short stories in ways that they don’t often in novels. The wilder the conceit, the harder it is to sustain, like it’s rocket fuel.

Complicating Consent: The Millions Interviews Katherine Angel

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I think a lot of the harm that's done in the world is done through men's denial of their vulnerability — and also women’s collusion with that denial.
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Sometimes There Are No Good Choices: The Millions Interviews Robbie Arnott

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If I’m stuck for something to write about, I start describing a landscape I’ve visited recently—a forest, a stretch of coastline, an ocean, a mountainside—and then see if a story or plot line curls off it.
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Celebrating What Defines Us: The Millions Interviews Joshua Bennett

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Pain or terror persists in the night, but joy comes in the morning. You have to go through a gauntlet to get to joy. It’s not easily gotten or reached—or sustained.
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How We Endure: The Millions Interviews M.I. Devine

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Pop means saying something deep in a stupid way. To say something stupid in a deep way, of course, is to be an academic.
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Ghosts Who Walk Among Us: The Millions Interviews Claire Cronin

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It wasn’t ghosts and demons that most frightened me while writing; I was haunted by God.
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