To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

I see the world in ways that might be considered somewhat harsh and Darwinistic. At the same time mediated, as in Darwin, by a real idealism and an excitement about the possibilities of the intellect and imagination to deal with this somewhat brutal world.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

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