Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it..

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think,….

The talkers are rising above the thinkers..

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it..

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turne….

I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. ….

(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries..

Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones lik….

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business..

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I rememb….

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think ….

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails..

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle..

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers..

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write..

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to c….

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands but only becaus….

It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud..

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest..

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious..

But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know ? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really Y….