Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.