Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?

My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

I just finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," which I think is a work of genius.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.