Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.

I would never want to write a character who was not thoroughly herself or himself. She's a very specific creature in my mind, and she has her thoughts, which range from skin to American history, philosophy, and the arts.

If I have to work on something for too long, then it must be wrong. At a certain point, if I've worked on a sentence for about an hour, then I realize that it's probably not the right sentence and means I'm trying to make something fit that's ungainly.

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

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

Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.

Jokes are great capsules of information. I think they should never be censored. They often are offensive - and we're offended by different things - but I believe deeply in what Freud wrote of their relationship to the unconscious, which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That's what laughing is: a release.