When a book is in its final stages, I've just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that's fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I'd just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That's sort of ideal.

in general, I feel most comfortable between known quantities.

Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.

Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.

My parents were travelers. Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead they went somewhere. That's what they did. So I got the bug from them.

I love the Bahamas, and I used to go there all the time with my friend who passed away, Henry. And I love it there, especially that island [Grand Exuma], so I've been there a lot over the twenty years.

I've always traveled. I'm a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.