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.

Sexism goes so deep that at first it's hard to see; you think it's just reality.

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

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.

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.

There is still nothing like equality for women in jobs, in family. There's just an awareness that inequality is not acceptable.

For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.