Stacey D'Erasmo

“I'm embarrassed to reveal that I never went to CBGB's in the '80s. I was never cool enough to be a punk, and I wouldn't have had the stamina, or the discipline, for straight-edge.”

“In my darker moments, I feel like the Queen of England, bound and gagged by reverence. Tin-crowned and irrelevant.”

“While 'A Blessed Child' might have been a more tough-minded book had Ullmann thrown a spanner into the works, it's not hard to understand her decision to keep things going.”

“Reading 'The Third Sex' feels a bit like flying in a veering helicopter over a rain forest that is disappearing before one's eyes.”

“I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.”

“Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.”

“I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.”

“The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.”

“The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.”

“I'm a huge fan of San Francisco. And I was out here for a couple years in the mid-'90s when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.”

“As lightly toned by reality as the women on 'Sex and the City,' the bold, soigne characters on 'The L Word' suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the entire world is glowing and delectable.”

“The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance, imagine the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location.”

“Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.”

“'The Girls' tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, who are not only literally but spiritually attached for eternity. Born joined at the head in 1974 to a feckless teenage mother who abandons them, and reared by a delightfully open-minded adoptive couple, the Darlen girls are darling girls, indeed.”

“There is no such thing as a natural fit between form and content. Seamless elegance would be tantamount to erasure.”

“In 1976, divorce could still raise eyebrows, as could a woman's decision not to have children. Dyslexia wasn't as commonly recognized then, and thus not treated as it is today.”

“For the Supreme Court, the right for everyone to say 'I do' is where the story ends, but for artists, it's where the story just starts to get interesting.”

“A touring band is a family and a workplace at the same time, and you're living with people you didn't necessarily choose every day for up to a year.”

“The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.”