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The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.
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Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant.
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The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango.
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When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country's northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West.
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Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit.
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Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you.
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I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care.
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Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want.
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I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
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Hong Kong has plenty of superlative hotels, amazing food, and cool shopping.
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Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.
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I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends.
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From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com.
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There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't.
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The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life.
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One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.
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In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
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I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.
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I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.
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Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people.
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Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.
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I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it.
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We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there.
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I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it.