When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.