I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

Everyone needs a strong sense of self. It is our base of operations for everything that we do in life.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

Depression is always in the details.

I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

There is no end to what can be said about the world

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.