I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.