I found that if I’m home for dinner, I can get the scoop from my kids on the day. After [they] go to bed, I check email.

In retrospect, I certainly think it would have been much better from a public relations viewpoint not to have played the games, because I did respect President Kennedy a great deal.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people, and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, “Well, that’s a ritual.” And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular … For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

You are your best thing.

it's not profound regret. It's just a wiping up of tiny, little messes that you didn't recognize as a mess when they were going on

Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, “Mama”—and that was always around five in the morning. Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.