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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. "

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" 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. "

" When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry. "

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

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

" I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed. "

" 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. "

" Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life. "

" I just cannot stand an unmade bed. "

" It is true that all mothers do things differently from their own mothers, but they don't necessarily do them better. "

" 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. "

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

" I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels. "

" In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine. "

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

" When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads. "

" Really, my sacred place is my study where there are books that I love and things that people have given me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else. "

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

" I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else. "

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

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

" 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. "

" 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. "