My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

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

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.