You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.

I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

When you have your heart broken wide, you are also open to things of beauty as well as things of sadness. Once people are not here physically, the spiritual remains, we still connect, we can communicate, we can give and receive love and forgiveness. There is love after someone dies.

I'm not afraid to say what I'm afraid of. Does that make me fearless?

This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.

I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.