Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.

I think those women who get themselves to write essays, it's not an easy thing to do because as women, you're not encouraged to think; you're encouraged to feel. This is a broad, broad statement. So I think those women who go out on a limb and publish essays are highly conscious of how they are writing their opinions.

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.

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

I think the slowness of exchange is over, and the idea of waiting for a response - that's gone. People don't want to wait. It's all this instantaneity. That's fine. But it also makes writing different, if you're writing for an instant exchange compared with being able to have time for more reflection.

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

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.