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

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.

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.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

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?

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.