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

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

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

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.