Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.