 Girls are crazy and mean. They don't fight fair. |
| It takes as much discipline to be a mother and a wife as it does to do anything else. |
| I wouldn't characterize my work, however, as directly political. |
| In the end, my pursuit of the elusive New York State driver's license became about much more than a divorced woman's learning to drive for the first time. |
| Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would. |
| A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized. |
| Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. |
| Some girls are taught to be sexy. |
| I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios - the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us - and the feeling of ritual the classes had. |
| When I was pregnant, I felt filled with life, and I felt really happy. I ate well, and I slept well. I felt much more useful than I'd ever felt before. |
| My mother wanted me to understand that as a woman I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to, that I didn't have to use sex or sexuality to define myself. |
| How weird it was to drive streets I knew so well. What a different perspective. |
| There are no rules in fights with girls. Just hurting. |
| I think people are sexy when they have a sense of humor, when they are smart, when they have some sense of style, when they are kind, when they express their own opinions, when they are creative, when they have character. |
| Don't make a threat and then not do it. |
| Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life. |
| You have to defend your honor. And your family. |
| I had some fears as a kid, but I was also relatively fearless. Maybe that's a result of living half the time in reality and the other half in fantasy. |
| Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way. |
| So you eat, you sleep, and then this wonderful child comes out, but you don't feel like you have any control over that process, over her, over her character and who she is. |
