Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.