Ottessa Moshfegh

“I've always known what I'm meant to do. The path of my life has been about discovering what I need to do to support myself as a writer.”

“I've found that people get particularly frustrated and shut down when women in fiction are disgusting or disordered.”

“I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.”

“Once I finished 'Eileen,' I wanted to write more novels. I don't see myself stopping any time soon.”

“I don't care about being a literary personality - that doesn't appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn't appeal to me. I actually don't feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, 'Whatever.'”

“I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.”

“My dad is a gentle and brilliant Iranian violinist.”

“Every time I saw Lacey, she'd gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she'd become.”

“I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing.”

“In my own experience, I've found that it's very difficult to make peace with women. We tend to be competitive and feel angry.”

“Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.”

“It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.”

“I've always been interested in family secrets and what happens behind closed doors. I find that fascinating and creepy - that's why I read: because I want to know other people's secrets.”