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" 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. "

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" This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English. "

" You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one. "

" What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done? "

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

" I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it. "

" 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. "

" Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred. "

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

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

" I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck. "

" Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away. "