Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.

Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.