Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

I went to an all-girls school for part of high school, and the idea of boys was amazing to me, like, all I ever wanted to do was kiss boys and be around boys.

I'm really interested in bands that sound nothing like anything I do or can do. That's what interests me.

Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel's existence.

Here's what I've found in Louisiana: The voters want to know what you believe, what you stand for, and what you plan to do, not what shade your skin is.

We're not all supposed to think alike.

Someone once said "The only thing that will be left after a nuclear holocaust is Cher and cockroaches." I think that's funny, because, you know, I am a survivor. If I am anything, that's what I am.

It was dreadful, I had pain. It was like someone was trying to put pressure up there.

Free men set themselves free.

Being behind a camera, in front of the camera, is my own little deconstructionist niche.

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.