You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language.

Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds.

Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.