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.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.

Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.