Tama Janowitz quotes:

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

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 don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.

Crimes, sins, nightmares, hunks of hair: it was surprising how many of them has something to dispose of. The more I charged, the easier it was for them to breathe freely once more.

As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.

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 was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it.

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

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.

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

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

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.