Alexandra Kleeman

Sometimes I want to withhold judgement on whether something is good or bad, but I do feel like identifying with TV characters - connecting to them emotionally more than you connect to literal, physical people in your life - causes problems. They just don't have the same existence or boundaries as you do. They resemble us, but they are not us.

As a culture, we really like our food passive.

These days, there are times when my academic thinking intervenes in my writing, but it's usually while I'm developing a project and not while I'm writing it.

You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it's constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you'll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes.

I went into academia thinking that there'd be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.

I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.

We don't notice that our cells are turning over all the time. You get a completely new composition of cells every seven years, and on the surface, or subjectively, it looks as though you're the same for seven years. It's like a ground - it looks stable, but beneath it, everything is shifting all the time. It's exciting and dangerous.

When you seek out - or seek to avoid - your own reflection, the modern city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reflective walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a cacophony of different versions of you - this one too short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color you've never seen before.

I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.

I'm really interested in passivity as a type of action - sort of allowing the situation to change you, choosing to give in being an act of agency rather than an act of submission.