When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?