Mary Gordon

“My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever.”

“My life is so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

“My weakness is 'American Idol.' My husband thinks it's ridiculous. But I am so inspired by those young people who are singing their guts out.”

“In my early life, I was a professional folk singer. I used to sing on the national television and radio in Canada. Nobody knows that - but now I've said it, haven't I? I'm strictly a shower singer at the minute.”

“My father's politics and ideas were, to me, unforgivable. He was a Jewish convert who became very anti-Semitic, and I didn't find the anti-Semitism forgivable.”

“I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix.”

“Feminism is very much a part of a lot of my student's lives, but they're not going to march about it or take a public political stance. And I think more and more young women are claiming that they're not feminists - even though they are.”

“I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy.”

“Everything that turned out well for me seems like a fluke. I feel like, at any moment, I could lose everything and be working at Dunkin' Donuts.”

“We all of us deserve happiness or none of us does.”

“I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me.”

“One should never be sexually involved with anyone one genuinely cares for. A sexual relationship guarantees a loss.”

“It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.”

“My mother really loved me. And one of the gifts that I have been given is that I have never thought for one second of my life that I was not greatly beloved.”

“People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!”

“My favorite dish is bibimbap, which is composed of various vegetables, steamed and pickled, and meat toppings over a bed of rice.”

“I wasn't thinking about my pension plan until about two years ago. When I was in my twenties, the idea that you'd be thinking of taking a job based on its health-care policy was completely foreign. But these days young people are thinking about these things.”

“'Catholic writer' seems like you have an agenda of evangelization, as if you were somehow influenced in your choice of perspective by dogma or canon law. That has nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot in common with other 'Catholic' writers.”

“I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.”

“Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.”