I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

The greatest griefs are silent.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

I grew up in a household of women, they ran the show, they kept it all together. I credit my ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.