Nice girls are not supposed to be hungry. They are not supposed to feed themselves or care about their own food. They're definitely not supposed to take food out of a child's mouth.

Don't you think almost anything can be funny? Almost anything.

I love ghost stories, I love to read them, and I love the idea of being haunted.

I'm really interested in the United States, what it means to be American - maybe because my father's an immigrant and my grandparents were immigrants, and also because I grew up so isolated from mainstream life, and it was such a total shock to leave the commune and, in a way, enter America for the first time when I was eleven - so I've always felt a little like an anthropologist - like, what is this strange place I find myself in, what are the rules here?

The "we" voice is rare, and the communal impulse of the "we" is interesting to me.

When I was in college, I had a friend who was an artist and her theory was that all the best art in the world is funny/sad. That was her favorite genre. Funny/sad are probably my two favorite tones.

It is radical for a woman to choose to survive and to choose to eat anything.