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.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

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

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.