Tama Janowitz

Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.

On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.

With publicity comes humiliation.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn't know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.