It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff--get undercut by having to play football.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.