If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.