If I had a trait that I truly deplored, I would work to erase or modify it…Probably, a lack of discipline. (Though people think that I write quickly, & don’t revise, quite the reverse is true.) To myself, I work very slowly & painstakingly, & am often frustrated by accomplishing so little. My friend Margaret Atwood has said that in the late afternoon she is likely to be overcome by a feeling of desperation that she has accomplished so little that day, & this is a feeling I share, often. It seems that I waste most of my time gazing out the window here at my (overgrown) garden; & when I am in Berkeley, where I spend about one-third of the year, I am forever gazing out the window toward the San Francisco Bay & a continually changing, always-beautiful sky.

I am a massive people-pleaser and it brings me nothing but trouble.

I thought that I had lost for a reason, and I thought that I was a little unseasoned and immature, and I had — the way I made decisions my first term, I got a lot done, but I was better at doing what I wanted to do than listening to other people about what they thought I should be doing or how they thought I ought to be doing it.

I talk over people all the time.

Sleep apnoea and tinnitus.

When a relationship I’ve been invested in stops working. And yet, here I am, happy as you like.

Persevering with a career that was predicted to last six months and still being here four decades later.

Kind, funny, moany – I do love a moan.

The last few years. There’s a beauty to getting to an age where you really don’t care about stuff that used to bother you.

Can’t remember.