Julia Alvarez, on writing:

 

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk.

It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this:
that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in.
'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem.
And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house
is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.
 
– Julia Alvarez.