I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.

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.

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.

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.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.