If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us

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.

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.