Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

A finished person is a boring person.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.

It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

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.