You're Like A Cake When You're Young.

I Like To Say That My Mother Had A Very Ordinary Life. From The Outside It Didn't Look Like There Was Anything Particularly Special Or Wonderful About It, But When You Watch Somebody Hold On To That Life With Both Hands, It Makes You Think That Life Must Be Pretty Damn Good.

We Read In Bed Because Reading Is Halfway Between Life And Dreaming, Our Own Consciousness In Someone Else's Mind.

Anyone Who Has Breast-fed Knows Two Things For Sure: The Baby Wants To Be Fed At The Most Inopportune Times, In The Most Inopportune Places, And The Baby Will Prevail.... And So The Baby Should, And The Mom, Too. Sometimes A Breast Is A Sexual Object, And Sometimes It's A Food Delivery System, And One Need Not Preclude Nor Color The Other.

I Think What Saved Me, As A Writer, Is That There Are Really Two Breaking Points In My Life. One Was When I Was 19 And My Mother Died, And One Was When I Was 31 And My First Child Was Born. And That Sort Of Gave Me A Kind Of Rebirth That I Think Has Been Invaluable To Me As A Novelist, In Terms Of Seeing The World Anew.

I'm Boggled By The Idea Of Being An Only Child. I Know Nothing At All (i'm Happy To Say) About Having Had A Cold And Withholding Mother, About Being Divorced. The More I've Been Writing Novels, Each Novel I've Written Has Become Successively Less Grounded In Anything Approaching Autobiography.