I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.

I don't think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.

No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you're saying.

A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

I want the plot to be as complicated as possible. Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

I tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.