Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.