The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

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

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.