Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

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

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

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

When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

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.