I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric..

I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person..

The purse is the mirror of the soul..

What usually happens is that when I'm nearing the end of one novel a vague idea about what I want to do next begins to present itself to me in terms ….

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work..

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, ….

So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know ….

the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and ev….

Familiarity breeds content..

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals..

Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing a….

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story..

I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart..

With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to….

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership..

I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by wi….

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experie….

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're….

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have co….

The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think might be important or pivotal, a lot of t….

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books..