We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.