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

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

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.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth,

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

Left right left right. We're army ants. We swarm we fight. We have no home. We roam. We race. You're lucky if we miss your place.

I spend my money on my props and my creations. I'm an inventor.

It's a privilege to pay taxes. Yeah! It's not a political question, folks. We have to pay for stuff.

I'd never been a prison guard before or anything.

In the American colonies, the main problem of liberty has been solved, demonstrated and practiced in such a manner as not to leave much to be said by European institutions.

I would do fragrance. I'm a fragrance fanatic.

A walk in the woods is only an exalted dream.

Baptism is an outward expression of an inward faith.