My work caused me to interview hundreds of women about their lives and their problems.

'Aurat' is an iconic poem which is relevant 70 years later and informs me in the work I do with women.

It still amazes and fascinates me that women of color have kept my work alive for these many generations.

I would say that Cynthia Nixon is somebody I admire, and Toni Collette as well. Those women - their work inspires me, whatever they do.

What keeps me up at night? Sometimes it's day-to-day work stuff. And a lot of the times, it's, 'Am I making the wrong decisions in terms of reaching young women?'

I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

The reason I choose not to speak about my husband is because the press is prone to erase the individual identities of women who work in the industry. I don't want that to happen to me.

I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband's name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.

Girls didn't really take much interest in me until I was about 14. But I knew how to talk to them very quickly. What I figured out - that my friends didn't - was you have to talk to women like you're not constantly trying to have sex with them. That seemed to work.

I faced a number of challenges whilst I built Biocon. Initially, I had credibility challenges where I couldn't get banks to fund me; I couldn't recruit people to work for a woman boss. Even in the businesses where I had to procure raw materials, they didn't want to deal with women.

I think it's so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That's so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper.

I don't live in the city, I don't work in a high-risk environment, and I am not a smoker. So it was never anything that would occur to me that I would get lung cancer, but the more I have learned about lung cancer is that it is becoming much more random, and it is striking women who are under 50 and are non-smokers and not in a risk environment.

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