“Nothing inspires me like the imagination in a vacuum. I always pick the most closet-like, even coffin-like, space in the house for my writing room. No windows, no photos, no ‘stuff.’ I never play any music, I don’t have an inspiration board, I disable the internet, and the cell is always off. The outside world is far too tempting. If I go out for a run, suddenly the body is of paramount concern; if I listen to my favorite music, I won’t be able to shake the imprints out of my head; if I watch a great movie, I’m seduced by images. I have to stay put with my project when I'm with-project. Fortunately, my projects always require little research and much imagination work—maybe memory excavation at best. But if you’re going to ask kids to finger paint, you don’t put Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ before them. They don’t need Erik Satie. They don’t need a long jog. They don’t require a Quote of the Day from Rilke. There is no need to warm up. What made me fall in love with writing in the first place was that we have all the equipment we need in us—we don’t need anything else.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007)