I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven’t read.

Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen’s husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways.

I’ve always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn’t have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private – a comforting thought.

I’m not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought ‘Husbands and Wives’ was great.

It’s usually easier for me to begin writing in a character’s voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They’re very different, and I can’t do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I’ll learn something from them.

I think, in general, it’s better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I can’t listen to music when I’m writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.