My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

I am a moralist. I worry.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.