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.

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.

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.

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

You can't replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that's not to say you shouldn't get more dogs and people in your life.

Let us be brave in the face of adversity.

The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome

Never will the Anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia.

Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

I warn you, I refuse to be an object.

I've been trying to write really simple songs to make them sound like they're coming out of a satellite that's crashing into a gas giant or something.

If you're working with a director you trust, you can turn that part of you off that wants to direct other actors in a certain way.

I grew up around backstage, and that clinched it for me.