If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Joy is the best makeup.

I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.

Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.

Dancing almost always turns out to be a good idea.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.