I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you're ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don't have to show it to anybody. That's what I did.

I absolutely think that women told that writing about themselves is somehow not worthy enough for a public audience all the time. I hear it so often from my students and friends. As if it doesn't take rigorous craft, and intellectual acuity to write a slammin' book of any kind. But perhaps, especially, about the body.

It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves.

New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.

All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.