In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

Be lovely and do no harm.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

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.