You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it.

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store.

Once you leave, you're no longer of that country, but you are never actually of the country that you go to, and if you go back, you're not anywhere. You never belong to anything.

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it."

Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet.

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is.

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.

I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.

Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, " while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.

I'm kicking new flava in ya ear!

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

Human excellence means nothing Unless it works with the consent of God.

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture. Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other, for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.