The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

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.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.

Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.