Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories

All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

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.

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.

Courage is more important than confidence

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.