She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.