Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.