Marisa Silver quotes:

Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?

I never know where I'm headed when I'm working on a book.

The language of the novel differs from the just-the-facts language of the old tales. It's robust and earthy, sometimes even baroque.

We grow, we mature, some of us give birth, we age, we die.

As we change, the way in which we are perceived in terms of our relevance, our value, our beauty, and sexual potency changes.

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

I guess I'm drawn to stories of people whose physicality puts them on the outside of things in order to explore the ways in which an identity is formed around these prevailing attitudes.

I'm interested in endurance. People persist in the face of the most excruciating hardships.

In fact, not knowing is a necessary condition of writing for me. I don't know how else to reach something unexpected. I have to be as in the dark as my characters.

The story has to flow from an unstructured, felt place, but then I have to bring my analytical brain to bear on issues of craft.

Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

Writing, for me, is always a dance between the critical part of my brain and the subconscious.

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?