When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

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

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.