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

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

When farming became a corporate venture, and the distribution of food became corporate, the variety of foods that were considered good diminished greatly. I know that there's a lot of misconception about this, that people think we have more food variety than ever before, but, in fact, if you read any of the studies, you'll find we have fewer foods than before.

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

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

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.