I think you get mentally ill being homeless. Most of the bag ladies wind up mentally ill pretty quickly - what people would call paranoid - because they are in such danger. I don't know if it's really paranoia because they are in great danger. Terrible things happen to them, and they lose everything. How could they not become at the very least severely depressed?

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.

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

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.

I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.

People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.