The Way To Write A Book Is

We Have Lost The Art Of Public Tenderness, These Small Gestures Of Wiping And Washing; We Have Forgotten How Abjectly The Body Welcomes A Formal Touch.

If You Try To Control It Too Much, The Book Is Dead. You Have To Let It Fall Apart Quite Early On And Let It Start Doing Its Own Thing. And That Takes Nerve, Not To Panic That The Book You Were Going To Write Is Not The Book You Will Have At The End Of The Day.

For 10 Or 11 Years, I Had My Kids, I Wrote Four Or Five Books, And I Was Working All The Damn Time.

Write Whatever Way You Like. Fiction Is Made Of Words On A Page; Reality Is Made Of Something Else. It Doesn't Matter How "real" Your Story Is, Or How "made Up": What Matters Is Its Necessity.

There Are So Few People Given Us To Love. I Want To Tell My Daughters This, That Each Time You Fall In Love It Is Important, Even At Nineteen. Especially At Nineteen. And If You Can, At Nineteen, Count The People You Love On One Hand, You Will Not, At Forty, Have Run Out Of Fingers On The Other. There Are So Few People Given Us To Love And They All Stick.