But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

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

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

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

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