“The materiality of the writer’s life cannot be exaggerated. If you like metaphysics, throw pots. How fondly I recall thinking, in the old days, that to write you needed paper, pen, and a lap. How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often ‘written’ with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with full hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet” (The Writing Life, 46).

From a not-so-recent interview with Judith Thurman:

There's some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It's very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism.

My friend Jenny Boully has a great essay in Triquarterly that you should read. It's about being (half-)Thai in America, and the way identity and food are tangled up in each other. Here's an excerpt.

Justin asked that if I made the pad Thai could I please not use fish
sauce. I told him there was no way to make it without fish sauce. He
said that fish sauce upset his stomach, which I took to mean turned his
stomach. My grad-school friend asked that I not use canola oil but olive
oil instead. I tried to explain that olive oil was not used in Thai
cooking, and that the two oils cook differently in addition to tasting
quite different. She said something about her holistic doctor. Some
girl, who was trying not to get pregnant for the fourth time by douching
with lavender oil, asked that I not use chicken because she was
vegetarian. Another guy asked that I not use egg because he was vegan,
although I watched him and the vegetarian both drizzle fish sauce onto
their noodles. Someone’s boyfriend had just finished shaving his head
and was walking around in a skirt; he told me that he had a Thai
girlfriend once who was very sexy and that I should read this certain
book because it would help me to figure all my shit out; the girlfriend
made a mad sound and stomped out of the kitchen.

(…)

In the end, it was “pad Thai” that I made: something that repulsed me
but that others ate up. And although everyone complained about it not
being “authentic,” that is, not being the way they were used to having
it in restaurants, it was all gone by three in the morning. Although the
real Buddhist was now going to bed when the sun set and waking up when
the sun rose, he had gotten up at three in the morning to eat whatever
was left of the noodles, then went back to sleep again.

I love how Jenny plays with a certain kind of American's fussy (pathological, you might say) relationship to food and the way it fights with an all-consuming need for authenticity (without any sense of what "authentic" might be).  That's not the ultimate point of the piece, but it is one of its sharper observations.