I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.