Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.

the separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column.... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.