The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?

As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.

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

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