Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

Everyone has it's own great triumph, has he own story with sadness, madness and reverses. That's how we are build, few are the people which share their story, most cases because of shame.

I grin, and he beams with

Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.

I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

I've never thrown out a TV set out of some hotel's window, but I have thrown a microwave out of one 'coz it was cooler.

Shake structures. School yourself. Look twice at a thing, once upside down. Answer yourself clearly.

I like having a woman. I like having someone to come home to, to make all of the hard work feel worth it. I need someone with me. And I want someone.

It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else.

Is the care of the dying man truly robbing care from the poor man? How reliably can we know when someone is in the last ten days of life?

I said,'Instead of going in the direction that a lot of the women singers are going in [revealing], I'll be very, very sexy under 18 pounds of chiffon and lace and velvet...I will have mystique.