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."

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, "We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood," he said, "Not going to happen." Those apparently were more or less his exact words.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.