My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.