writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.

I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.