Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

I think I would have liked to have been a twin... Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.

I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.

And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.

I think it's significantly easier to be a female writer today than in the early 1800's. That said, it's hard to imagine almost anyone who knows anything about publishing disagreeing with the statement that women writers today are often taken much less seriously than men writers. But it's hard to quantify, and even define, what being taken seriously means.