I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.