I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky. The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, ‘Thanks for asking, but I’m really not into white guys right now.

Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend.

If I were president, I would turn the tables and allow the fetus to abort its mother.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I'm friends with a lot of writers and so many of them say how much they hate signings and how they leave after a certain period of time. But what is so hard about sitting there while people tell you how much they love you? And if you don't like it, well, learn to like it. I try to take one person at a time. I never look down the line to see how many more people are left. And I always try to make people talk about something besides whatever they planned to say.

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.