I don't think I've left a trail of weeping women in my wake. I mean, the number of serious relationships I've had has not been into double digits.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Courage is confident action.

People more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.

Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars.

Off with the old and on with the new and never a second's thought between.

I just don't know how to date.

I think an amnesty program... which is what the president (George W. Bush) has proposed... those are reasonable proposals.

We are all born creative. We just got it educated out of us.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, and I consider myself lucky and blessed to be where I am - just working.