in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all.

I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

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.

It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.'