Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.

I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.