[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.