I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

To be a pacifist in the face of evil is to be complicit with evil.

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.

Growing up, my brother and I were begging for attention.

I love the puzzled look on people's faces when I mention I grew up telling time according to television.

Sensibility is the power of woman.

I have twin boys, 12, and a daughter, 17.

In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and glory.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

I want the same standard applied to homosexuals as is applied to heterosexuals.

The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.