Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.

It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.