Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.