Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

All around us are complex people trying to live simple lives, ” she said. “Wanting simple things with tangled hearts.

The one thing that I'm in charge of in this wedding is the food.

'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

As long as you're neurotic and crazy, he's great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.

Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal.

When the darkness rolls in, I'll be there through thick and thin.

The 40s are when you start trading your psychological problems for physical ones.

War justifies everything.

Under the freest constitution ignorant people are still slaves.

Keep your goals away from the trolls.