My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.