Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

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.

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!

She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.