It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl as opposed to some other different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.

A lot of people are obsessed with looking cool. They feel they have to look after their image.

After a semester or so my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

When I grew up we had gym at school two or three dance classes after school ice skating lessons and all sorts of sports at our finger tips. We weren't glued to computers because they didn't exist so being active was all we knew.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us and when certain conditions happen are triggered the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people I would never never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.

As everyone in Louisiana knows there was often no communication or coordination between the state and federal government in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

By and large the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is after all a form of communication.