The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing.

Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives.

Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.

If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.

We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story.

I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.

At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.

For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world.

The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.

In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.

I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.

I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.

If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.

I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.

At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!'

There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.

In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.

I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish.

To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.

If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.

I don't trust people who are likable.

We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.

Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'

I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.

Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.

For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.

A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.

When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.

I remember laughing so hard as a kid.

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

I wish I were a really good photographer.

This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.

I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.

The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?

There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.

I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.

Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.