Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

There is no weather in malls.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.