My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.

Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.

We had this unbelievable faith that no business has done, quite frankly, and we tripped along the way doing it, but within two years, we were in 40-plus countries. So we ran at an amazing pace, and this is where venture capitalists play a role. Making Groupon into what it is today, we had no role in it; the entrepreneurs did it.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.