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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?

There's nothing in Chinese culture that is an equivalent of the geisha. It's so different, so special to Japan.

Martial arts is just practice. Being a geisha requires complete control.

For myself I don't like the geisha look. It's like a mask.

I was really interested in geishas' work, and wanted to meet real geishas.

'Memoirs of a Geisha' is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

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.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

When you are gestating, you feel full of life, you feel full of joy, you feel full of fantasy, of stories.