The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.

I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.