I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.

Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?