I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.

I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.

Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.