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

In my life as a wife and mother, I'm always conscious of my desire to be present.

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.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.