Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.

As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.