I don't really think of writing as a career. It's something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it.

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.

The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

Pregnancy is difficult for women but it is even more difficult for men.

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.

All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don't give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down.