I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bu….

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story..

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here..

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the….

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper..

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I wa….

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night..

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addresse….

The daily work - that goes on, it adds up..

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly..

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock an….

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer..

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation..

restraint equals indulgence.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws..

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting ….

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally ….

A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global wa….

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we ar….

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulde….

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives..