Gustave Flaubert said, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi." It is not possible to write something you are not, but to have a new form, with a different hair color and a new body ... I do very little of that. That's why I keep bringing up the same people. I haven't given myself a hard time about it. But I can't make six new characters instead of one.

I read on a Kindle. I must be of the opinion that the new way to read is a pretty good way to read. It's a new way. Those of us who like the smell of books get upset but nevertheless this is the way we're going.

Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.

My idea in Half the Kingdom was simply, or not so simply perhaps, that medical science has given us twenty extra years of life. Those twenty extra years - one is grateful for them, one is happy, but they also give you ten or twenty years more of losing your faculties. That is actually the origin of my notion. Once you live longer than you're supposed to live, things go dreadfully wrong. But nevertheless, you're not dead.

First book was handwritten, then the printing press, now we've got our Kindles. To be able to push a button and a dictionary comes up. And then, at my age, that I can make the letters any size I want, and that I can carry all of William Shakespeare, all of Gogol, all of Franz Kafka in my handbag? You've got to love it.

I dare say you believe I'm going to die. I bet you don't believe you're going to die. You know it, but you don't believe it. Imaginatively, I think we find it impossible to believe we don't exist.

I wrote Her First American and I always say it took me eighteen years. It took me that long was because after about five years I stopped and wrote Lucinella. I got stuck; it was too hard to write. Lucinella felt like a lark. I wanted to write about the literary circle because it amused me, and I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do. It's just one of the things I'm allowed to do if I feel like it.