Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.

Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?

That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved...Freedom is...not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.