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

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.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

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.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.