The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.