It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.

Everything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse.

When I wrote 'The Good Body,' I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn't value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn't live in it.

Geography does not define you - love does.

What neo-capitalism does so brilliantly is that it's always subdividing and dividing, so that people are never able to be joined in their numbers and strength in a unified way. That is exactly what we have to overcome.

Why don't we bring everyone up to be caring and compassionate, to believe that we are connected with everyone and everything around us?

To have insurance and have a diagnosis and to have doctors, I just felt it would be immoral on some level to complain.