First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.