The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.