I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you really can't believe that there's something else at the end of it. Something that isn't just more pain. But there's always something else at the end; something at least a little different. You never know what that thing will be, but it's there.

I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.

We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one.

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.