Full stories are as rare as honesty.

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.