When 'The Awakening' was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author's home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.