When I was at home, I wasn't shy. I was the clown at home, because I was loved. It was in the outside world that I was judged and I wasn't loved. That was very clear to me, that I wasn't loved. So I became very quiet. You know, those little girls you see in those pictures that look like they want to hunch, I was trying to disappear into my shoulder blades. The quietest person in the classroom, that was me. But that wasn't me at home.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.

My trainer taught me, because he's Iranian, and that's a beautiful snack [pistachios]. I have some with me, actually, in my bag. You could eat that on a plane instead of the salted nuts. And a serving size a day is the size of your hand, not the size of your head!

If you're poor, potato chips are the food of life for you. It's the caviar.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

Even if we don't know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.