You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?