The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.