I wanted to tell him that I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do - that maybe I always will. I'll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special. Maybe if we were ten years older it would have worked out differently. Maybe. I think it's just that I'm not ready for forever.

I was shy, but I stood up in front of the class and I gave my report.I was reporting on books that I didn't want to read. I was inventing books that I didn't want to read.

Sometimes I'll say, "I wrote that book," and the person will look at you as if you're really strange. One time that happened to my daughter on a plane. She was sitting next to a girl who was reading one of my books and my daughter said, "My mother wrote that book." And the girl started to quiz my daughter, asking her all sorts of questions, like what are the names of Judy's children and where did she grow up. My daughter thought it was so funny.

I never read a horse book in my life. But I thought that's what my friends were reading and that's what I should be reading. And this was "Dobbin Does This" and "Dobbin Does That."

If all you leave in the library is books that you think speak to everyone, what are you going to have? You'd have nothing.

[Writing] totally changed my life. It gave me my life. Everything opened up.

"Summer Sisters" was actually was a huge influence on "Girls" because it was the first thing I ever consumed that sort of looked at the way that female friendship can be glorious and can be complicated and can be so like a worse betrayal than something romantic and it just showed these archetypes of femininity than totally sort of individuated them and exploded them.