One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."