It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.