Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.