There is some consensus: There's obsession, there's never satiety, and there's always remorse. For me, the big thing is that you're always breaking a promise - for example, you promise yourself you're just going to have coffee with a man, then before you know it, you're in bed together.

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.

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.

The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

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.

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.