I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn't begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

My father was in the First World War.