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

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.

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

To show our commitment to the future means to dedicate our time, efforts, resources, saving nature and to develop nice thoughts for better thinking.

I'm prickly. I fuss over every single detail.

My sisters and I can still recite Dad's grilling rules: Rule No. 1: Dad is in charge. Rule No. 2: Repeat Rule No. 1.

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages

I've been around racing a fairly long time, but when it comes to the important issues, I'm happy to let others make the big decisions.

Life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I'd like to be remembered as a man who went to Heaven and not another place.

I think that a lot of women that know they're going to be part of history somehow decide to have a character to be remembered by.

Some makeup you put on and feel like you're getting pimples by the hour.