We don't choose what's going to wake us up.

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

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

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.