While you can't keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart...once you realize the difference between what you can control and what you can't, and that it's far, far more fun to lavish all that attention on your own self-worth.

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.

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.

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.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.