“Women move through the world never knowing their power.”

Food was celebration, conversation, and nourishment.

One person is all it takes to give a kid confidence.

I am in total silence when I write.

You can’t know if you’ll be here tomorrow or a year from now.

I look at my roommates who are so proud of me that it makes me proud.

And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery.

When people are filled to the brim with love, they are their most beautiful.

They figure out what you need and they give it to you – without you asking.

Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time.

And if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars.

No matter how large a horse’s ass you are, to stay by your side until death. A fool could tell you this is a bad deal.

Relief is a wonderful emotion, highly underrated.

The Wise County Bookmobile is one of the most beautiful sights in the world to me.

And then just like real sisters, we listen and don’t judge.

On every shelf, we see ourselves, experience our collective conscious, describe our dreams and our great longing for times that have passed.

There’s nothing an artist needs more – even more than excellent tools and stamina – than a deadline.

What makes a good animated movie is being able to balance adult and knowing in-jokes and also just out and out funny things that make all people laugh. The idea that it’s actually something that will appeal to a family, that’s the trick.

You know how misleading an image is. You see an image in the newspaper, if they left the caption off, good luck knowing what’s going on. There is something inherently misleading about images, so they need annotation.

I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.

One of the biggest and most pleasant surprises is that, even when you have that need to keep up an appearance of being right or knowing, there is life after admitting you don’t know and that’s beautiful.

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.

I have frequently said, and I will repeat again, in the manner of any well-meaning seriality, that I’m interested in mixing the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Fearlessness, absolutely. Discipline. You also need open-minded creativeness that lets everything in. You never want to lose a word or a phrase, yet every one should count. Always the best language possible. And, finally, knowing when to leave it alone. Stop when it’s done.