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

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.