The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

Mona Simpson

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

Mona Simpson

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man, and he was my brother.

Mona Simpson

Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world.

Mona Simpson

I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.

Mona Simpson

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in 'Gourmet.' It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course - everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did.

Mona Simpson

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

Mona Simpson

I suppose 'My Hollywood' is only as politically meaningful as it is deeply inside the least powerful of its characters. I wanted it to reveal scenes of subtle exploitation, odd instances of accidental power and challenges to decency specific to its time, but also impulses of generosity that transcend our particular era's messes.

Mona Simpson

I'm a simple cook, and there's a lot I don't eat. But food is important. It translates so easily into pleasure.

Mona Simpson

I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.

Mona Simpson

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.

Mona Simpson

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

Mona Simpson

We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.

Mona Simpson

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

Mona Simpson

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

Mona Simpson

I eventually made the reunion with my father that I'd used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we'd both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer needed a father.

Mona Simpson

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

Mona Simpson

When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of her clients and his little sister while the parents went away on vacation. She brought me along.

Mona Simpson

If a mother is sitting in a chair at the office, someone needs to be at home with her child. In some cases, that is a father. Much of the time, the material manifestation of the conflict is a nanny.

Mona Simpson

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Mona Simpson

The more you learn about animals and animal rights - it's an intriguing, fascinating world.

Mona Simpson