Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.