I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."

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

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.