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" I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another. "

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" People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously. "

" My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters. "

" I'm the kind of person who is entertained watching someone simply be themselves, whether they're putting their children to bed or making dinner or sitting at the table reading the morning newspaper. "

" When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work. "

" I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write. "

" The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff. "

" No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way. "

" Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests. "

" When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues. "

" Ideas come from life: what happens in mine, what I see happening in others', mixed with a great deal of imagination. I might see a person in a grocery store and build a whole character and life out of what's in her basket. "

" We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading. "

" As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them. "

" Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off. "

" If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction. "

" My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore. "

" It is one thing to see your friend dance around a table when she's 25, quite another thing to see her doing it when she's 62. "

" When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship. "

" Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times. "

" The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books. "

" One of the great pleasures in writing 'The Dream Lover' was learning about some of the real people who populated George Sand's life. What a cast of characters! And what a pleasure to recreate them upon the page! "

" Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny? "

" I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire. "

" If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner. "

" For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write. "

" I just cannot stand an unmade bed. "

" Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love. "

" In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story. "

" As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. "

" The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you. "

" Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is. "