I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.