I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

So I do think sometimes the political mechanism is completely disconnected from the people. However, what I will say is that history tells us that whenever things start to move too fast, whenever progress makes people feel a little breathless, one of the go-to spots that government, that the ruling powers that society goes to is to try to repress women.

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.