Lydia Millet

“At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.”

“There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.”

“I used to try to write around the edges, but now I try to walk a more direct line.”

“When I was 16, I went to Berlin - West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city - to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.”

“I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.”

“The male domination and chauvinism of the comics form is either being wittily lampooned in 'Watchmen' or handily perpetuated, depending on whom you ask.”

“I'm for any woman who loves sloths.”

“You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!”

“The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.”

“Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it's fair to say 'Watchmen' stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.”

“I don't write the same book twice.”

“We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'”

“If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill - no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.”

“At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.”

“Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.”

“The Safari Club International has worked the legal system hard to try to keep polar bears - threatened primarily by climate change, but also by hunting - on the list of creatures people can import as trophies after shooting.”

“People who are obsessed amuse me.”

“In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.”

“…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.”

“I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.”