Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

You have no replicate

You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself

There's a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement only believes that's the only thing women are meant for.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction.

If I'm going to be working out two hours a day, I may as well have a goal... and I'm pretty competitive by nature. A triathlon is a new fun thing.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.

You got barn cats and you want to make them tamed, you need to get them as kittens.

Start slowly, then taper off.