The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired..

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it..

Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find i….

The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp... 'You'll curse the insects,' he said at least, 'and you'll curse the natives... The sun….

I'm happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you've won the lottery..

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day..

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head..

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to..

I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does n….

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain..

Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging..

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school..

I heard a computer scientist the other day refer to playing with the Kinect as 'storytelling.' At first I thought that sounded a little high-minded, ….

I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time - it's part of the fun for me as a writer..

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wand….

Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and ….

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilara….

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and ….

The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was start….

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done..

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me..