Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.

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