Janet Fitch

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.

I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

Women writers specifically... are the ultimate outsiders.

Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.

My mother had been a solitary chef. It was her recreation and her escape.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you!

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.