Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.

If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.

A finished person is a boring person.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.