Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever.

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head