We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.