"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."

"I come from a family of great readers and storytellers."

"I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object."

"But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie."

"The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power."

"But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here."

"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."

"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."

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

"Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do."

"Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless."

"Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown."

"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."

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

"This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes."

"But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on."

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

"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."

"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."

"I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area."

"We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course."