Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

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.

The truth is in the present moment.

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations.