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

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.