Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

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

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.