Novelist

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.

We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.