You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

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.

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

You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.