Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

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

I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.