it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

People are quite frequently eccentric.

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.