Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.