Alexander Chee

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, ...
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I would stay two years in San Francisco, then move to New York in the summer ...
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I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian ...
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Fate and history have a similar feeling. They are weird mirrors to each other.

The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held ...
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Andrea Schulz became my editor in 2009.

A woman's desire is either terrifying, or it's ignored.

At first, teaching was more or less a straightforward way of making a living and having access to institutional resources while writing - aka libraries. And that was not inconsiderable. But it didn't in any way touch the writing. Maybe it would push the writing aside sometimes, but mostly it was fine.

As a young writer, I questioned the idea that I had to write fiction in a world where I could write my own ethnicity only and nothing else. 'Fach' to me was a little like that. As a biracial person, that's an inherently unstable identity.

I had been in a professional boys' choir, and as a boy soprano, you're aware that your voice has an expiration date.

Fate and history have a similar feeling. They are weird mirrors to each other.

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I would stay two years in San Francisco, then move to New York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who lived there. When I arrived in New York, I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of a bookstore I'd worked at in San Francisco, A Different Light. They had a New York store as well, and arranged an employee transfer.

If you compromise, and then you succeed, that's another kind of feeling. But if you compromise and fail, it's two failures at least.

I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).

It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'

It is expensive to live in hotels, even cheap ones - more expensive than renting.

I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.

Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.

Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.

My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.

My first letter of acceptance, to UMass - Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman.

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.

My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.

My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.

The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.

The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.

When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.

When I'm identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. 'Did you go to school for it?' someone asks. 'Yes,' I say. 'Where?' they ask, because I don't usually offer it. 'I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' I say.