I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

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

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.