You know what ‘congregate’ means? It’s from the Latin. ‘Greg’ means herd. ‘Con’ means with. We’re with our herd.

Bill supposed that for every child there was a defining age, a fixed reference point in relation to which his parents would always view him; whereas the child’s own truest self would always be the present one.

A broken heart can masquerade as a cold one.

Lonely is a funny thing,” she said slowly. “It’s almost like another person. After a while, it’ll keep you company if you’ll let it.

The hard thing for me is to say no to people.

How much do we owe the people we love? Now I would add a follow-up question: How do we cope with the fact that we can't necessarily give the people we love what they need?

I'm happy to see book clubs on TV. Talking about books has always been an important and invigorating part of reading them, and it's nice that that is getting attention from the media.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

Some weeks there's no writing, and some weeks are full of writing.

I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.