I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

Why... is human desire so unsatisfying?

You will always end up doing what is better for you.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Warmth, kindness, and friendship are the most yearned for commodities in the world. The person who can provide them will never be lonely.

For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

I have had a holiday, and I'd like to take it up professionally.

What is life when living without the Lifemaker?

Congress should consult experts and consider alternatives and make 100% sure that any step it takes to police the Internet doesn't change the Internet as we know it.