We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

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.

Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]