What a relief to know she was out there. These books that are life rafts, these authors who never know exactly what they’re doing for all of us when they’re writing them. I can’t imagine that when they sit down to work on them, they think: Today I will save a life.

just wanted to be in a better place than I was when I wasn’t writing.

I would not trade my relationship with my brain for anything—it has always served me best; it is truthful, reliable, powerful; it solves problems; it makes art; it helps me to be of service in the universe. It is my reason for being.

No one deserves anyone else’s bad day.

Having any success as an author is like getting a promotion, only they don’t hire anyone to replace you at your own job. I had to be a good writer and I had to be a good salesperson.

Solitude is better as a block of time than as an entire existence.

(Consultancy, the great modern mystery profession.)

thought about the way women are told we’re crazy when we are just trying to claim our space in the world. The way we’re treated, have been treated, for eternity; how when a woman cries foul men invent ways to shut her up immediately. I thought about women who were burned at the stake, and what it means to be believed, and what it means to speak

The ultimate privilege, for me. A house I have for myself and can open up for others. A room for them to stay in. The fight was never for a room of my own. I always had that in my head, no matter what. I was always going to write. It was the fight for a room for someone else. To open up my home—and myself—to others.