You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.

I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.