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

[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.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.

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

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

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.