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I've had women who move to the towns I'm living in, just pack up and move there, never even met 'em before, 'cause they heard I lived there.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.

I'm interested in people who have lived, who are searching and questioning.

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.

Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings.

I was born in Copenhagen, and when I was a year old, we moved to Bangalore. I was always a shy person and was happy with just a few friends and that came from my own social awkwardness. I did not know how to make conversations.

I have a very broad range of life experiences.

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.