shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person..

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and….

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in ga….

That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down..

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right..

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy….

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend..

If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene..

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness..

You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen..

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go.".

When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours..

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen..

I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positiv….

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do.

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl..

I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person..

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote..

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff..

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard..