We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path...

That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness – that’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared...

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of...

The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, “letting your freak flag fly” is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch...

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that – smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can’t trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I’m writing.

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night’s sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute’s worth of...

Too bad I didn’t know you back then, I would have come and rescued you.” Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple,...

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

You can be two things if you’re a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place – even if it kills you.

My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of...

Life’s a shit sandwich, my ass. Life’s a polka and don’t you forget it!

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she’s had a very sad life.

Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I’ve undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths:...

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

You know what ‘Dolores’ means? It’s Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

When I asked my parents how the baby got inside Ma, they both laughed, and then Daddy told me they had made it with their bodies. I pictured them fully clothed, rubbing furiously against each...

The roundness of life’s design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

So maybe that’s what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn’t protect you from the truth.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice–to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a...

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

A life I didn’t choose chose me.

Love stories are probably all I’ve ever been able to write or want to write.

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences – and I stray pretty far from mine – I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some...

People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them — to feed them or fix them.

When I was a kid… I needed to belong.

I didn’t respond to him. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t look at his self-mutilation–not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter’s hand. They seemed more...

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness,” the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing...

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street… except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for...

Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they’re away? To come home and keep you safe?