Mary Gordon

Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.

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.

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.

If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.

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.

I love dancing; I adore salsa dancing and wish I could be in a Broadway chorus.

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

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

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.

I believe that if your primary motivation in life is to be moral, you don't become an artist.

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.