I'm 38 and I'm single, and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

I look for these qualities and characteristics in people. Honesty is number one, respect, and absolutely the third would have to be loyalty.

We have always learned about life by dramatising our questions.

Whoever coined the phrase, killing two birds with one stone, not only hated birds but also thought we needed to conserve stones.

I've been married nearly 34 years, I'm not perfect, I've made mistakes.

A perfect faith is nowhere to be found, so it follows that all of us are partly unbelievers.

Going first is courageous. I'm just talking on a spirit level now.

And I spoke out on women's rights, like equal pay for equal work

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

A noble book! all men's book!

A shifty, fickle object is woman, always. (Varium et mutabile semper femina.)