Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.

At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.

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

I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.

When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.