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.

In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.

The best part of being a writer for me is immersing myself in a fictional world, which is the opposite of being on social media. At the same time, if no one ever read my work, if I was writing solely for myself, I bet it would be lonely and a lot less fun.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

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