The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.

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.

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

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

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.