There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…) A good novel editor is invisible.

We’re all misfits herefrom our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.

Happiness is a talent like any other. It's another art form. Some people are good at it, some people aren't.

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul.

I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.

We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Live boldly. Push yourself. Don't settle.

You never know the nature of another couple's marriage, do you?

Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one's youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you've lost your mind, your balls.

They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how me interfere.

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?

I love singing and that's kind of my new thing.

Miserable is the fate of writers: if they are agreeable, they are offensive; and if dull, they starve.

I'm the youngest of six children; both of my sisters are housewives and they each have four kids.

True love means you love a person for what they are, not for what you think they should be.