A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.