There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.

No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?