She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

I was unemployable when I got out of college.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.