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

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" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "

" 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. "

" There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. "

" 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. "

" When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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?' "

" You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do. "

" Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person. "

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

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

" 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 many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite. "

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

" If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. "

" I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? "