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.

It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.

I am interested in people, and I am interested enough in people that I want to be friends with a lot of people and know about their lives. So I'm not a hermit. I'm also interested in writing about other things. It goes on and on. I sometimes wish that I had a different personality. But then I would write different types of books.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

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.

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.

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