We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy.

My closet is full of sad little scripts that didn't get made that have sad endings. It's very hard to get a movie made that has a sad ending.

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

You can never have too much butter - that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it.

[Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

What failure ofimagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possiblities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.