I'm very comfortable writing.

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."

You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.