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.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we'd never loved them, as if they'd never walked and talked and burned, forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.

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

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself