She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.