There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Now that I'm an older woman, I'm so much more aware of the changes - almost too aware. I feel sorry for being so dismissive. You have to think about what you're thinking about and realize that you're thinking it.

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.

I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.