Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?