I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

God is a God of Lovingkindness.

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.

It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.