Amity Gaige

“Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.”

“Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!”

“Reading 'Blood Will Out,' one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships.”

“I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.”

“I often read poetry to 'warm up' before I write.”

“To me, self-esteem is not self-love. It is self-acknowledgment, as in recognizing and accepting who you are.”

“I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.”

“I certainly want people to like my writing, but I know that if I write with the intention of trying to please people, the writing will not be good because it will not be authentic. So, ironically, I have to be willing to write something strange or unlovable in order to write anything truly good.”

“Other than a short article I read in 2008 when the real story broke, I have not followed the Clark Rockefeller case, and 'Schroder' is not a novelization of that story.”

“It's dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses - like those in a poem.”

“Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.”

“If you could literally 'rid' yourself of your problems by voicing them, I'd be all for it. But since that isn't so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?”

“Self-esteem comes quietly, like the truth.”

“'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.”

“As separate people, we are weak, but we could be a peaceful, powerful nation.”

“I think marriage and family keeps being written about because that's where we keep our reputations with ourselves - I mean, we can't quite slip the truths we reveal about ourselves at home.”

“I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life's regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union.”