Ruth Ozeki

"We’re afraid of saying the word “suicide” and talking about it. Certainly the word suicide has a kind of energy that is frightening, and people can be afraid of talking about it. Why is it that we forget we were adolescents once? I don’t forget that. Writers need to keep that part alive in order to write. What’s important (for adolescents) is that you have a lifeline; it can be your friends, it can be your family, church, writing practice, a teacher, your cat, your gerbil. And little by little, the hormones subside and you develop coping skills and you develop passions and things that are really worth living for, and you get through that difficult period."

"All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time…"

"As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist."

"I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."