You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?

Maybe life was like a sea, and all the people were like boats ... Everybody who was born was cast into the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbor.

Even the bad books I write are satisfying. I'm my least critical reader.

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

...a really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were.

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I'm the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness.

Kids are really tougher than adults, but we tend to forget this in an affluent society that lets kids indulge themselves.