“Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people giv...”

“Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. ”

“If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?”

“This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.”

“The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.”

“mooo," she said... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”

“words, you see," he said, looking at me again, "allow us to make permanent what is essentially transient.Turn a world filled with injustice and hurt into a place that is beautiful and lyrical.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”