I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.