New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

My religion is no way of knowing me.

I assure you that in all matters of discretion not involving food, we make etiquette tutors look like slobbering barbarians.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

First you train the followers to accomplish the mission. Second, you resource them: Make sure that they have the tools to do the job. Third, you reward them: You give them medals or bonuses.

Don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.

He is able who think he is able.

Eating is one of my favorite parts of the day

None of us can afford to pay the price of resenting...because of what it does to us.

Here you go, she said. I don't need it anymore. I'm very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, saved some other people's death.

Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.