I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

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

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.