Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.

When I’m taking a picture of Aya Sofia, what counts is the person passing by who stands for life

I like to go for a little drive up the California coast.

God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.

I discovered that the more I hustled, the luckier I seemed to get.

Plenty of times, I haven't been able to wear certain clothes because they didn't come in my size.

When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

I'm from Indiana, the home of more first-rate second-class men than any other state in the union.