I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.

In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.