I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.