I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

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

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.