This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.