“They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.”

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel

Why does life need evidence of life?

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

When I am sad and wearyWhen I think all hope has goneWhen I walk along High HolbornI think of you with nothing on

Our prayers run along one road and God’s answers by another, and by and by they meet.

I feel that I’d rather know an actors’ work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I’ll see them in something and I’ll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.

Help along one another’s projects and plans.

The many of us who attain what we may and forget those who help us along the line we’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along the way. The farther they go, the further we all go.

No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.