It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year after year, decade after decade. I remember I very badly wanted to write a newspaper column when I was only 21 years old, and I went to my editor and told him that, and he said, "You're a really good writer, but you haven't lived long enough to be qualified to live out loud."

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look.

Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before.