I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

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

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.