Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.

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

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.