I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.