The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.

To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.