Stacey D'Erasmo

“I'm not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges - which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.”

“You can get anything online, including things that don't even exist. We've invented our own collective unconscious. The normal rules of time and space don't apply. It's held together by some other force than gravity. It's endless. It's like some unimaginably huge, messy novel that's writing itself both with and without us.”

“Visibility is a tricky thing; is someone visible when you can point her out in a crowd, or when you understand what her life feels like to her?”

“What interests me are the complexities and contradictions and struggles and joys of messy human beings.”

“A performer needs and craves a live audience.”

“That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.”

“I don't know if my faith stems from what I'd call unconditional love, but the energy certainly feels boundless.”

“My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.”

“You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of 'The L Word' that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a claim on Large - as in a larger, denser, more ambivalent imaginary world, populated by imperfect and riveting citizens of all sexual stripes.”

“Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.”

“'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.”

“On a deeper level, there's a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there's been a time when there's been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to sort of rebuild that private space.”

“The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority.”

“A lot of times, really wonderful things that have come my way have come basically out of the blue.”

“There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.”

“Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.”

“One of the many pleasures of 'Versailles' is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was.”

“One of the things I've always loved about queer culture is the openness and passionate curiosity about love, desire and the myriad forms of affectionate ties.”

“A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.”

“Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely.”