Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

I spend most of my time writing.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.