Arthur Golden

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.