Carolyn See

“I'd never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn't think a book with the name 'Snakewoman of Little Egypt' would hold any appeal for me at all.”

“'Gillespie and I' is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.”

“You don't want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life.”

“'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.”

“I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.”

“What is 'cool,' anyway? Maybe it's Warne Marsh, almost totally obscure and penniless, coming in late to a fourth-rate Hollywood nightclub, playing like an angel with a couple of sidemen, but never speaking to or even acknowledging another human being.”

“I don't believe you can buy or sell 'cool.'”

“Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.”

“Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.”

“It was in 'Esquire' in the 1970s that I first learned Nora Ephron's recipe for borscht - certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine.”

“Very much as men project weird fantasies on women, the people in New York project weird fantasies on California.”

“I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.”

“There's a saying that when you go on traveling tours, you get to know whom the designated jerk is going to be within three days, and if you don't know it by then, you're the jerk.”

“It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?”

“'The Talk-Funny Girl' opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.”

“Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.”

“I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.”

“Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.”

“If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.”