SUE MONK KIDD

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

I think books with spiritual themes simply point to the deeper mysteries of life - to what lies beyond us, to what's hidden inside of us, or perhaps to an understanding of what truly matters.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

On weekends, I sit in a lounge chair on my balcony. I love to be outside when the weather's right. I can stay there pretty much all day.

I've noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others.

I have an old dog named Lily, and she's a black lab.

All I knew about bees when I started to write 'The Secret Life of Bees' was that they can live in a wall of your house, and that they make this incredible thing that I loved.

I'm a big believer in the way ritual can put us in connection with our spirituality.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.

I don't go in search of ideas; I try to let them find me.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don't think I've written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don't think that would work.

Writing in the voice of an American slave felt like I was biting off something very large.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

I think the word 'freedom' is beautiful, not so much in its phonics, but just in the power of the word itself.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.

It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.