No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?