Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised