JANE HAMILTON

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.

'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'm really glad I had those years working on the orchard alongside my husband.

I think we're all more alike than we want to believe sometimes.

I spent my entire youth being in love with gay men because they were the most interesting and compassionate people I knew.

I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.

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.

I experienced unrequited love early.

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

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.

I grew up studying dance, taking ballet lessons.

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.

We didn't have a TV until I was 12.

I've always broken out in hives when I go into any organized religious situation.

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.

In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

As a species, we would not have survived without humor.

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.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

It was impossible not to admire him, not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty- drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one's natural life.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.