Amity Gaige

For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.

Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

Reading 'Blood Will Out,' one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships.

I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life's regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand.

I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.

There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.

I loved Madeleine L'Engle as a child - 'A Wrinkle in Time.'

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.