I think I'm an optimistic person. Ultimately I believe in people. I believe they can be robust. When my collection Delicate Edible Birds came out there were one or two people who read the title as being a commentary on the characters within the pages, the women in the book, meaning that they were these fragile girls meant for male consumption. But I had meant the opposite - these people are tough. Dark things happen to them but they get on with life as best they can.

I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.