For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.

I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.