A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.

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.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

Depression is always in the details.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

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.