There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.