She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie Fall on Your Knees, they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.