Quotes

[on having children] No, I don't think so, but then I was never strongly maternal. My brother also doesn't have children, it could be genetic, but it could be that I was so very interested in writing that I just didn't have time, although I do like children. My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës.

I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.

[on not having an assistant] No, I'm too shy to hire anyone. I couldn't bear the thought of it. I remember Margaret Drabble saying that it was really hard for her to hire a cleaning woman because it seemed like hiring her own mother. We're from a background where we did the cleaning ourselves.

[on self-respect] We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it's gone--its value is incontestable.

[on desire] In love there are two things: bodies and words.

[on time] Surpassingly lovely, precious days. What is there to say except: here they are. Sifting through my fingers like sand.

[on art] We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

[on spirit] How reluctant the world is to grant complexity in us...how reluctant we all are. Though knowing ourselves mysterious, subtle, complex, self-contradictory.

On living in New Jersey: The people! Definitely, the wonderful friends and colleagues in and around Princeton; the same is true for New Jersey as a whole. I often visit the Delaware Valley; my favorite small town is Lambertville, and also Hopewell...New Jersey is a beautiful state, truly a garden state-though my own garden is a modest one, it brings me much happiness each year.