~I didn't have to write more books and have people admire them to feel like a writer. I just had to accept it as my calling. What I needed was permission, and I didn't need to wait for someone else to give it to me.~

~The basic industry problem is one of supply and demand: there are more books than there are people who want to read them.~

~To write about the coffin, not the grief, as Jim Crace says, is the single most useful piece of technical advice about writing...~

~Fear is the number-one thing that stops us finding our voice.~

~In many ways a memoir is a magic trick. A good one will give the illusion of real life, but it isn't real.~

~Virginia Woolf said that a writer needed a room of her own, but I think physical space is less important in the twenty-first century than mental space.~