... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!

Those who are the most happy appear to know it the least happiness is something that for the most part seems to mainly consist in not knowing it.

I am shocking, impertinent and insolent that's how it is.

Black folks never bungie jump. That's too much like lynching for us. I'm gonna let you tie a rope around me and push me off a bridge? You must be out your damn mind.

And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.

I have a terrible memory.

I live by the rule that you should follow your dreams…no matter what you do, you should follow your dreams

Things have to be funny first, and if they want to have a point, that's awesome.

I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.

I don't really cringe over any of my albums.