It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.

The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after.

I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.

The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested.

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.