Carolyn See

I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.

I'd never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn't think a book with the name 'Snakewoman of Little Egypt' would hold any appeal for me at all.

If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.

You don't want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life.

'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

I don't believe you can buy or sell 'cool.'

What is 'cool,' anyway? Maybe it's Warne Marsh, almost totally obscure and penniless, coming in late to a fourth-rate Hollywood nightclub, playing like an angel with a couple of sidemen, but never speaking to or even acknowledging another human being.

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

Very much as men project weird fantasies on women, the people in New York project weird fantasies on California.

Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.

There's a saying that when you go on traveling tours, you get to know whom the designated jerk is going to be within three days, and if you don't know it by then, you're the jerk.

It was in 'Esquire' in the 1970s that I first learned Nora Ephron's recipe for borscht - certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine.

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

'The Talk-Funny Girl' opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.

'Gillespie and I' is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.

I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.

I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.