As long as you are promoting something that you really believe in - yes, it's incredible to see that designer earn the esteem they deserve - but there's something to be said about the fact that if you're convicted about an opinion, and you really believe something's great, you're not going to credit yourself for their success.

Man Repeller is intended to chronicle all the fashion trends that women love and men hate. I started it because I am woman with a deep appreciation for harem pants. And sometimes blaming clothing on a sad love life is easier than blaming oneself!

I have a degree in journalism, which is something that I make very clear very frequently just so people are aware of it. I went to school to write... Editorial integrity is very important to me.

When you have a voice, you also have a moral obligation to use that voice for good.

When I'm wearing red lipstick, I'll never do anything with my eyes. And it's so easy - you just put on red lipstick, and your whole face just seems done.

Sometimes I wear red lipstick - it makes me feel sophisticated.

We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.

A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.

If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before.

Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.

I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.

As a genre, the best horror poses central human questions - Who can you trust? What is the cost of our secrets? What is our relationship to history? What are we blind to? What evils are lurking under the smooth surface of the self? - through radical dislocations.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.