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

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

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

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

" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

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

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

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

" 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. "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing. "

" Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about. "

" We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks. "

" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "

" 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. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human. "

" In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. "

" Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world. "

" An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.' "

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

" I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had. "

" 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. "

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. "