I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

There seems to me now to be the notion that you send something to a journal or an agent and months go by. It seems to me like that is a new piece of bad manners. Probably. Generally I assume that anything that happens now happened to Adam and Eve also.

I'm always amused by the way questions are asked. "What did you intend?" That's not even a recognizable verb. You don't intend when you write. You sit down and you're thinking things and dreaming things and someone says something and you think "Ah!" That's how it happens. Intention is not part of the game.

Franz Kafka is a huge influence, more than the Grimms. To allow yourself to get into the coal bucket and fly to the sky ... we learned that from Kafka, that you can have a thought and make a body of it in this way.

There's that wonderful line in Measure for Measure. I forget which of the characters has committed adultery and is going to die. He looks at his hand and says, "How could this die?" That's the joke. I've always thought, and this is nothing new, that we don't really believe we die. I think you're going to die, because I know that's what happens but I can't imagine I'm going to die.

I don't go to the movies because they scare me. I don't like anything that is suspenseful, even pleasantly so.

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.