Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.

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

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.