Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.