Occupation: Novelist Birth: April 8, 1955
Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission,….
Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to ….
Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure..
I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them..
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look ….
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives..
Everything truly important is washable..
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning of….
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration..
Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom..
High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly..
If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that th….
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet un….
When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answe….
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it..
Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back ac….
a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth..
There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that..
Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmo….
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness..
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history..