Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.