I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.

When you free women so they can choose to have or not to have, or to conceive - that's something that, for millennia, women couldn't do. Biology was, in many ways, destiny. We wouldn't be talking about gender if women could not control their pregnancies.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.

I do think we think repetitively. It's so hard to get certain thoughts out of your head. If you're angry at a friend, you're going to keep going back to that conversation.

What I don't like about teaching is hearing myself say the same thing. I mean, you just want to sort of shoot yourself after a while. But you don't have a million different ways of thinking about what you have been thinking about for many years. And then there's the truism that you're only as good as your students. If they're not into what's going on, it doesn't matter who you are.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.