I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.