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.

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.