Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.