It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.