As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.