There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

It's a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.

No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.