I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.