How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about this nation that inspires people, or perhaps draws people, who are strongly idealistic.

Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.