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

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

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.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

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.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.