When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.