Katie Kitamura

It's hard, but I try not to think of happiness as either pending or in the past.

There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy.

It took me a long time to accept that I was a writer.

I think there's such a fine line in a relationship. The role of imagination and privacy... how much space can you allow before that becomes distance? And similarly, imagination is empathy. That's how you achieve empathy. It's how you can be with another person and understand how they are in the world.

Generally speaking, there's some quality of compulsion that attaches itself to the idea of the list. It's true that lists organise the daily chaos of working life. But the impulse to make lists has to do with something more than either administrative practicalities or the record of a creative process.

Modern sport can be an ugly convergence of commerce and celebrity, but it still has the capacity to move a crowd.

The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying.