You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.

There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.

...and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life