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.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

I can't write what I don't believe in.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.