If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

I wish I could view the belly that oozes over the top of my pants as a badge of maternal honor. I do try. I make sure that the women whose looks I admire all have sufficient fat reserves to survive a famine, and I make a lot of snide comments about the skeletal likes of Lara Flynn Boyle and Paris Hilton.

I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.

The statistic that 67 percent of women's admissions to the psychiatric facilities are during the week before menstruation is critically important to every woman, and to every woman who feels she suffers from depression.

I love the novel of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful movie. And they're totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that's kind of the ideal.

I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.