So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.