Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

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

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.