I was lucky to receive help at the beginning of my career and now I want to help other writers as much as I can.

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.

I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.

Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going.

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

Head's all empty, I don't care,' he'd sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I'd force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I'd care.

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

I have lived in worlds beyond counting and countries as strange and wonderful as the dance of dust in sunbeams, because I have lived in books.

I'll just hit the dry side of the ball.

I've looked in the mirror every day for 20 years. It's the same face.

The momma bears are demanding, 'Protect our kids.'

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

Straw mulch, a ground cover of white clover interplanted with the crops, and temporary flooding all provide effective weed control in my fields.

I love street, adore street. Life is about mixing things and to be divine in the streets. Voila!

Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back.

The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.