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" It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can. "

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" With 'Durable Goods,' I meant only to write about being an army brat. What emerged was a story about compassion - the need for it, the expression of it. "

" I think writers are born, not made. "

" When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent. "

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

" 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. "

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

" If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it. "

" I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it's the opposite: I believe 'Durable Goods' is the best thing I've written. "

" When you have that deep kind of hunger that is part longing, what's better to eat than the best apple pie? Or the best potato salad and guacamole? Or the best deviled eggs and crab cakes and white chocolate raspberry pie? "

" No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story. "

" Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with. "

" I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are. "

" I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy. "

" 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. "

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

" 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. "

" No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person. "

" If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost. "

" I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person. "

" A ritual or tradition can be as simple as something you do every night, like read a story to a small child, or something you do weekly, such as go out for Chinese food. "

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

" Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea. "

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

" My favorite splurge is homemade chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream or a Sausage McMuffin with egg or scalloped potatoes or turkey yanked right off the carcass and dipped in gravy or See's chocolate. "

" As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work. "

" Every book is its own experience, the writing of it. "

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

" I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had. "

" Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them. "

" 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. "