I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, "Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow," that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.

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

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.