I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

So I do think sometimes the political mechanism is completely disconnected from the people. However, what I will say is that history tells us that whenever things start to move too fast, whenever progress makes people feel a little breathless, one of the go-to spots that government, that the ruling powers that society goes to is to try to repress women.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.