I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

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

You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.

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.

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

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