Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.