You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right.

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.

Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons. ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind.

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.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.