We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.

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

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.