The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

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.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.