Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.