Miranda July

“Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.”

“Each couple's version of intimacy is so fascinating to me. A friend will tell me about her marriage, and I'll think, 'Yikes, they have horrible communication! They're going to get divorced!'...”

“I'm often drawn in by a description of a woman thinking something familiar that's never been articulated before, as in Diane Cook's 'Somebody's Baby' or Nina Berberova's 'The Tattered Cloak....”

“When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.”

“My job is to have new ideas and take risks every day, so I'm always looking forward to the next thing being done or making the next thing that I haven't yet gotten to. That's sort of the con...”

“I have a big brother who would make dolls' houses and playhouses and furniture out of wood. He was the one who taught me from such a young age that you could just make something. The physica...”

“I'm quite a cerebral person. Often I feel quite stuck in that.”

“An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It's a nice thing to collect because you can't go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I've only found about 12...”

“I didn't have any vices before the Internet. There are a lot of cracks in the day, moments where you don't know what to do next, so you have a little hole where you look at your phone. You w...”

“I spend a lot of time obsessing about getting a dignified eight hours' sleep.”

“I know I'm going to lose a lot of readers over this, and I don't care: 'Garfield' is overrated. I have always felt this, even as a child. That dumb man and his dumb, mean cat have gotten mor...”

“Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there's this tension between harmlessnes...”

“When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis...”

“We humans are here because nothing can be perfect. There always have to be some living things that are unsatisfied, itchy, trying too hard. If it was all just animals and rocks and lettuce,...”

“I have female friends who work in all different mediums who I speak to at least once a week. It helps me so much to know that I'm not alone. I think that's the bare minimum you need to susta...”

“As a young artist working in multiple mediums, the work and especially the writings of artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were very important to me.”

“Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a m...”

“I think this is how life is. It's not a linear march through time; you revolve around the same old things as you age and acquire experiences.”

“I've always had a dog phobia.”

“Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.”