I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

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

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.