I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.

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.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.