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.

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.

Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.

Solitude offers a lot that being coupled or being in a group does not. It helps us learn what we are capable of.

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

I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.

I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.