The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

I do have trouble with titles.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I can write anywhere.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I couldn't read a screenplay without puking.

I don't trust anybody that doesn't do good work. I don't give them any credibility. If they can't write, why should I believe anything they have to say?

I had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.

I think the trouble with artists or chefs who whine about criticism is that if you love the good reviews, you have to at least read the bad ones.

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons - quail, doves, grouse up north - but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.