To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

if you live in New York and you have a guest room, you have guests. So I think it's best not to have a guest room.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Music is the can-opener of the soul.

Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

It's interesting how identity politics and Ann Coulter-style tactics have now blossomed. But they were always there in CPAC.

I feel like I'm on cloud nine right now.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul, but prayer puts my soul in command of my body.

I'm as clean as the days are long.

Mick has expressed an interest in coming to the gallery tonight because he's seen me behaving myself lately. He is being much more supportive, which is nice.