When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

I'd love to spend a day being supermodel beautiful.

You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.

I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

I remember things like that...A lifetimes accredidation of unkindness, all of those little longering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets.

If you put a pink cover on something, critics make a certain set of assumptions and may not even read the book. But my readers are happy with it.