You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.