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.

I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

There questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you're in a gallery in New York and not an artist if you're doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If you've been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations - familial, social, human - if multitasking has been your forte and that's what's been praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently for women and for men.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

But we're lost in a world of appearances now.