As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.

I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.

My body is a compass - and it does not lie.

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind, as Vaclav Havel says, "an orientation of the spirit." And I have faith; maybe more than hope, I have faith. I think of my great-grandmother, Vilate Lee Romney, who came from good pioneer Mormon stock. She always said to us that faith without works is dead, so I think if we have hope, we must work to further that hope. Maybe that is the most important thing of all, to have our faith rooted in action.

I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.