I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.
I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.
I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.
I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.
I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not.
Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.
Fiction is a report from the interior.
For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.
I would like to never ever think about any political issues.
The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.
I didn't want to write travelogues.
It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.
It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.
I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.
I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.
I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.
