“Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to c...” — Laura van den Berg Quote

“Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.”

“The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.”

“I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.”

“For me and my drag, I think camp is about exaggeration and artifice and the celebration of superficiality. A lot of my fans look up to me as a figure of femininity but that's all artifice. That's all fake and that's campy within itself, and so that's what resonates to me: the seriousness and the funniness and the artifice and the exaggeration.”

“That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.”