My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So they've always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.