Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.