I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

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

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

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.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.