I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

It is absurd to imagine that any child will be able to earn a living, let alone contribute to resolving our world's complex problems, without knowing how to read and write. My foundation supports the National Writing Project so that teachers can be more effective in their efforts to improve literacy for all students.

Everyone is born with some special talent.

I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional.

Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.