We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father." He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples." He nice, the Jesus.

I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.

I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.

This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

I always think it's a good policy to like the people who like you.

I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.

Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.