I'm not classically pretty; I've always been too heavy; I've had thyroid disease and it's very hard for me to lose weight - but I've always had men pursue me. I've always had that 'it' thing. God knows why. Maybe it's pheromones, I don't know.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.

Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.

I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.

Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

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.