As a professor I can't teach writing.

Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.

I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.

I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?

I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding a place but the soul of its people.

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment.

I think some writers should wait for something to say.

Given all that lies beyond mycontrol, I obsess about the few things I can control

My belief is that communication is the best way to create strong relationships.

Never call an accountant a credit to his profession a good accountant is a debit to his profession.

Fashion has become a joke. The designers have forgotten that there are women inside the dresses.

Between my past, the present and the future, there is one common factor: Relationship and Trust. This is the foundation of our growth.

At the top of my list for terrain that I hate navigating through, it is definitely the mangrove.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Women were relegated to an inferior caste ... most dramatically with the coming of industrialization. 'Women's work' was segregated from significant human activity.

Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task.

Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.