"There are certain sacred things in my life that I would never talk about. Because they are clear in my head, I can walk freely around the opposite side. I keep them completely separate in my mind."

"People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness."

"This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more than pets."

"He can make me love something just by showing me the energy with which he loves it."

"I usually approach things with the idea that I will take something out of everything I do."

"I have to live the content, then come back and write about it."

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."

"It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules."

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."

"When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned."

"Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility."

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."