It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

Astriola. That IS demon pox. You had evidence that demon pox existed and you didnt mention it to me! Et tu, Brute!' He rolled up the paper and hit Jem over the head with it.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.

Marriage is no substitute for political experience.

I think when I work with actors it's all about a process of learning to be private in public, instead of performing in public. Which is what women do: we perform, especially our sexuality.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

A disciple is a disciple maker.

But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.

The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss... it is inevitable as life.

A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.