Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.