Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it's not like it stops. They're on the phone with me every day; I'm intimately involved in their problems.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves

There's always that moment when you realize what it's going to be. You might have an overarching theme and you need to fill in the blanks - and then there's this "Aha" moment when you see where it's going. That's the most satisfying part of writing.

With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant.

It's a little dangerous for me to get outside myself and think about how I want people to see me.

Southern gentility is evocative to me.