Everybody's damaged by something.

I say "on principle" [regarding 'lesbian writer'] because whenever you get one of your minority labels applied, like "Irish Writer," "Canadian Writer," "Woman Writer," "Lesbian Writer" - any of those categories - you always slightly wince because you're afraid that people will think that means you're only going to write about Canada or Ireland, you know.

In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

Nowadays, 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.