Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.