“What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.”

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Everything truly important is washable.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

There is nothing better to display the truth in an excellent light, than a clear and simple statement of facts.

My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition.

Do we have a brain? Than use it. It’s all you need to overcome a problem. That’s the secret. That’s my simple but powerful prescription for life, love, and success in a dangerous world.

The prayer of listening makes things simple but it also makes us vulnerable, and that is frightening.

Pooh is able to accomplish what he does because he is simpleminded.

A simple democracy is the devil’s own government.

I didn’t even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.