If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.