I always say to my students, if you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

I believe in keeping running simple and, in regard to shoes, that would mean no gimmicks, unnecessary cushioning, etc

The wisest thing to do if you’re living in hell is to make yourself comfortable.

The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display.

Ive not cooked Christmas dinner since 1982.

A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.

The pebbles of knowledge must be bonded together by the cement of experience.

Losing is not in my vocabulary.

Fastidiousness is the envelope of indelicacy.