My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out. So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.