These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.

I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.