I'm really glad I had those years working on the orchard alongside my husband.
— Jane Hamilton
I grew up studying dance, taking ballet lessons.
There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.
I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.
A lot of the people of the Midwest came from the Northeast. We're of the same stock. Yet something must have happened when we crossed the Ohio River Valley because I have sensed that there's more of an openness and flexibility of spirit out West.
In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.
All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.
I experienced unrequited love early.
In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.
'Never change' is the thing that probably high school students have written in each other's yearbooks for time immemorial. They think that command is possible!
I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.
I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.
We didn't have a TV until I was 12.
Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.
I think we're all more alike than we want to believe sometimes.
As a species, we would not have survived without humor.
I've always broken out in hives when I go into any organized religious situation.
I spent my entire youth being in love with gay men because they were the most interesting and compassionate people I knew.
I don't think that talking to anybody can help you - a writer or a nonwriter. So what do I do in Wisconsin? I don't know. I just slug through it.
People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.
