Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.

Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.

Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.