The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. ‘I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,’ they say. ‘Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she’s done to our family.’ Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. ‘You will be mine,’ I commanded.

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

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.