But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

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.

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

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

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.

Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?).

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?'

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

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

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