Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control.

I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65. But by the time I was 33, to tell you the truth, I was a little bored with drugs and sex, and I thought I'd do the writing thing.

If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

People die', she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.