I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I'd read Jane Eyre when I was ten and, although I didn't understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her.

I write out of defiance.

When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables.

Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.