It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

A woman's life isn't worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn't felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that's what love is.

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .