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

I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.

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.

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.