The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

Learn to draw strength and inspiration from your past victories by keeping a victory journal where you capture all of your success experiences.

our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life

How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them - is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan.

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.

Simply stated, power is the ability to get things done.

An actor knows two important things - to be honest in what he is doing and to be in touch with the audience. That's not bad advice for a politician either.

I think there is something bigger in store for me.

I had seen the great, but I had not seen the small.