Kate Braverman

“I've written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it's very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from my eyes and ears.”

“If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.”

“There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.”

“Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.”

“I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.”

“I have a great ability to improvise verbally, and I am very funny on a dime.”

“As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.”

“I'm manic-depressive, technically bi-polar II with many borderline features.”

“I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.”

“Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.”

“Falling in love with landscapes is what L.A. women do. It doesn't necessarily imply betrothal or marriage.”

“I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.”

“The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.”

“You don't just leave Los Angeles. Such a departure requires magical intervention. You can't simply purchase a ticket to another destination. You must disappear.”