I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.

Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.