When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now.

While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven't listened to much music. I used to work with music on and now I don't.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.

I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

I've been in this business for a long time, and I no longer think that anything that I do by way of clarification is ever going to eradicate the mistakes.

It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.

So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Those involved in the program are interested in how to use photography, videos, the Internet, film, and anything related to communications and transmission of information in the most up-to-date modern ways.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

I love photography. My boyfriend's got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday.

My use of the medium - photography - is in some ways traditional.

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.