...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.

[Friendships] are easy to get out of compared to love affairs, but they are not easy to get out of compared to, say, jail.

China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.

Smoking is, as far as I'm concerned, the entire point of being an adult.

In New York we have zillions of different kinds of people, many of them hate each other, but violence based on that hatred is really uncommon here.

[On the writers she admires:] I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties.

If you can stay in love for more than two years, you're on something.