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" Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history. "

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" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know. "

" For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular. "

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

" I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson. "

" Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life. "

" As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned. "

" If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me. "

" Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world. "

" In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety. "

" I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc. "

" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

" As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!' "

" Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try. "

" We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it. "

" We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story. "

" I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish. "

" I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition. "

" A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space. "

" I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives. "

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

" We read to find life, in all its possibilities. "

" Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives. "

" If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it. "

" I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "

" Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk. "

" For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. "

" I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody. "

" I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. "

" I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity. "