I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.