I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

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.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.