If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.

Well. I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.

I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can't help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

Parenting requires a delicate balance of letting your child be your spiritual teacher while you maintain the clarity and boundaries to be her Earthly teacher.

When we make friends then we change from being animals to being human.

Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.

Elections cannot inconvenience me. They ratify my will or I neuter them.

I wasn't expecting to do what I'm doing now...I've grown as a player and as a man.

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed. I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

I think that it is real important for someone to be really honest and open emotionally. I'm really an emotional person. If I'm that way and the guy isn't that way I just really feel like a jerk.

So: see ya, and I wouldn't wanna be ya.