As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

I've been keeping diaries for 27 years.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

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

I've never gone on Facebook and am not sure I understand it. The same goes for Twitter. I have someone sending tweets and pretending to be me, but I don't know why.

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

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