In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
I’m able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.
I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
I just write the books that I think I would want to read.
I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.
If I’m at somebody’s house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.
Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person – not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way – I don’t think that’s exploitive.
I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You’re sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?
I’m so trying to give up meat.
I think I would have liked to have been a twin. Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
Of course, I didn’t imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.
At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.
To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.
And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o’clock – these are enough. They are gifts.
I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.
It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.
I think I write what’s interesting to me, and so if I’m reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that’s by someone else.