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.

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.

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

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.

He had never met a girl who shot an arrow straighter than Cupid did

Greediness of getting more deprives ... the enjoyment of what it had got.

May the Heart of Jesus Christ be our school! Let us make our abode there. Let us study its movements and attempt to conform ours to them. Yes, O Divine Jesus, I want to live there.

Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

Theres monsters in all of us, but theres also vulnerability.

Nothing makes me more determined to succeed than someone telling me something's impossible.

Unhappy failures need not apply.

I'm a very sympathetic person, but that doesn't always come across in my work because I'm too busy being mad at everything.

You can't jump to vegan if you're not. Some people are absolute. Some people are able to be gradual.