Katie Kitamura

“I'm not one to probe my limitations.”

“It's difficult to identify why two cultures will react differently to the same sport.”

“I think there's such a fine line in a relationship. The role of imagination and privacy... how much space can you allow before that becomes distance? And similarly, imagination is empathy. That's how you achieve empathy. It's how you can be with another person and understand how they are in the world.”

“From their breakout 2002 single, 'Losing My Edge,' LCD Soundsystem have offered a unique combination of geek knowledge, passion and intelligent, ironic distance.”

“There's a long relationship between science fiction and the 'novel of ideas,' and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.”

“I like a lot of Spanish language writers. I really love Javier Marias.”

“I pretty much admire anybody who has the discipline and the will to make a career out of fighting. It takes buckets of nerve.”

“It's hard, but I try not to think of happiness as either pending or in the past.”

“The idea of physical strain and discipline, the question of how and when you leave that life behind - they're things I'm familiar with on one level or another.”

“I think it's poignant and powerful, this idea that if someone knows your name, they have the ability to kind of hail you and make demands upon you.”

“I was introduced to fighting by my brother - he's a tattooer, a tough guy - and I completely fell in love with it. I was watching fights on YouTube all the time. I would go to parties to watch UFC fights.”

“In a fight, you don't need much context for drama. You watch a fight, and that's it.”

“'Losing My Edge' was an anthem for the aging music nerd, with lyrics detailing a comically epic list of historical dates, bands and attended gigs: the anti-hipster's defence against 'the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties.'”

“As a writer, I think the greatest danger would be self-censorship.”

“The canon is dominated by books written by men, about men, and for men - the male voice is therefore not a particularly difficult one to impersonate.”

“Generally speaking, there's some quality of compulsion that attaches itself to the idea of the list. It's true that lists organise the daily chaos of working life. But the impulse to make lists has to do with something more than either administrative practicalities or the record of a creative process.”

“There's something about being a woman and being able to dress up in men's clothing, so to speak.”

“It took me a long time to accept that I was a writer.”

“There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy.”

“The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying.”