We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that’s more than just entertainment-w hich is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.

She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning...as does death.

Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.

People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.