All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don't give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down.

Pregnancy is difficult for women but it is even more difficult for men.

Our [western] culture embraces sex addiction. If I drink too much or rack up credit-card debt or lose the rent in Vegas, that's bad. But if I have many lovers, that's good.

The birth of a child is in many ways the end of a marriage - marriage including a child has to be reinvented, and reinvented at a time when both husband and wife are under unprecedented stress and the wife is exhausted, physically drained, and emotionally in shock. A man's conflict between wanting his child to have a mother and wanting to have the mother to himself is potentially intolerable.

I don't really think of writing as a career. It's something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it.

A wedding isn't for the bride and groom, it's for the family and friends. The B. and G. are just props, silly stick figures with no more significance than the pink and white candy figures on the top of the cake.

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.