I have a really good life and I really like it.

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it.

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store.

Once you leave, you're no longer of that country, but you are never actually of the country that you go to, and if you go back, you're not anywhere. You never belong to anything.

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it."

You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.

Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet.

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is.

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Intense feelings of any kind keep people with you. Some you may want, others you won't. To forget people, and you never really forget, feel indifference.

Essential to time-management is a change in focus, a change from being ‘busy’ to a focus on outcomes

I try not to think about my public life. I focus on my private life, and that's just the best way to live.

I didn't like not having work and not having people return my calls.

It's not that difficult to say no when you don't want to do something.

But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

And you still have to sqeeze into your jeans, but you're perfect to me.

Your mind is your weapon. Load your weapon.

Evil thought is a dangerous pet. It is safer to play with it from behind the iron bars of circumstance.