One thing I'm interested in is what shapes us: the people? The place where we live? It's both of those and more. That's what I keep coming back to..

how can you love a little cat so much in such a short short time?.

It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so ….

Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul..

Every character is asking: Whats my place? Why am I here? I dont want the answer to be Just because. You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason….

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never hap….

...but it doesn't feel crazy to us. It feels like what we do..

I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the leaves were falling to the ground, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for Phoebe a….

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing w….

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images..

I wondered about Mrs. Winterbottom and what she meant about living a tiny life. If she didn't like all that baking and cleaning and jumping up to get….

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was ….

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball..

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person..

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out..

A library is the door to many lives..

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad..

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too..

You know, maybe that's all anybody wants, is to be useful. And have somebody else notice it..

My granny Torrelli says when you are angry with someone, so angry you are thinking hateful things, so angry maybe you want to punch them, then you sh….

I cannot just write a frivolous book, a la-di-da book. Everything isn't la-di-da. There is something that's going to pull you up short. I want to rea….