If I Were Planning To

You Need Your Freedom. You Need To Be Able To Do What You Want To Do As A Journalist, As A Person Who's Speaking For Other Women As You Speak For Yourself, And You Make A Choice. You Have To Be Tough Enough To Take The Consequences Of That Choice.

You Have To Be A Lover Of Books Without Expecting More Of Them Than They Give - A Little Pleasure, A Little Insight, A Moment Of Escape, A Deepening Of Your Own Humanity. Not Much Else.

You Have To Have A Certain Kind Of Thickening Of The Hide. I Mean, I'm Not Particularly Worried About What Other People Think. If Other People Think That I Was Not The World's Most Perfect Mother, They Are Completely Right.

My Mother Had Died When I Wrote My First Book. I Was Twenty-seven, So It Was Right At The Beginning Of My Writing Life. I Don't Know If She Had Lived, If I Would Have Done It, Certainly Not Quite Like I Did. But, You Can't Rethink It. You Wrote What You Wrote, It Meant Something To Other People, And That's Your Good.

Self-pity Is Never Useful. It Tends To Distort Like A Fun-house Mirror.