My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don't think I've written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don't think that would work.

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

I'm always captivated by stories of women who find a way to be daring - misbehaving women.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.