I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

Even a flower can feel the touch of kindness.

Love is the spirit of light.

I'm certainly lucky to have got famous through something that was so well liked, generally speaking.

Caution is the path to mediocrity.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

Creation was not finished at the dawn of this earth, but creation continues, and we have a lot to do to make the world a better place.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

Words have meaning, type has spirit.

Water is finite and we have not done a great job of managing it in the past.

The real shame about the ending of the Guns N' Roses when I got kicked out wasn't just that I got kicked out, but Slash and Axl stopped working together