We live days and weeks and months and years with so little awareness of life. We wait for the bad things that wake us up and shock our systems. But every now and then, on the most average day, it occurs to you that this is it. This is all there is.

She tried to teach her children to be positive – to dream but to also do it with their feet on the ground. If you let loose that balloon, you will lose sight of it, she said. The best way to enjoy it is to hold tight to the string and plant your feet on a good solid path.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life – This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe – who would you want hearing your whispers? Or perhaps better: Who do you trust to hear your whispers? Whose breath do you want mingled with your own? Whose flesh still warm beside you?

When she doesn’t want to think about something sad or hurtful, she does what she instructed her own children and those she taught to do: Close your eyes and go somewhere safe and good. Picture something good.

For me, a happy ending is not everything works out just right and there is a big bow, it’s more coming to a place where a person has a clear vision of his or her own life in a way that enables them to kind of throw down their crutches and walk.

Humor – I see it as a survival skill.

I think that marriage vows should include an escape clause that says the contract is broken if one party ups and makes a big switch in religion or politics or aesthetic taste. I mean, these shifts just aren’t fair, and we need an easier way out.

The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.

You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.

I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible.