I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned.

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them

I always quit at three when my kids come home from school so I feel pretty spoiled

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" was extremely important to me.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.