I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.