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" I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "

" The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things? "

" I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last. "

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" 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. "

" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that. "

" The way I saw the world as a child was not wrong. And it's okay to see the world that way. If it doesn't hurt anybody. "

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

" I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. "

" My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family. "

" We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly. "

" If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe. "

" Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. "

" My husband had a stalker, briefly. "

" If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human. "

" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "

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

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

" I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong. "

" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "

" Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way. "