I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

We live in a funny time, a funny era, when desire, to be adult desire, has to be conceived as sexual. And that didn't used to be the case. Sexuality is a social construction as much as anything else and I think the realities of sexuality don't always fit into the social constructions that we have, and we live in a goal-oriented time - on all fronts.

When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you “best of all.” It's a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it's a small thing, but for me [...]

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than other women who think: Oh, goodness, well, if I let the lid off, where would we be?

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.