I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

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

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

The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.