Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.