“I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.”

“Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!”

“... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful bookis one of the main reasons I read;but it doesn't happen every timeor even every other time,and when it does happen,I am truly beside myself.”

“I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.”

“A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.”

“So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained not just in society but in literature.The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know if it can clean up the mess in our minds.”

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.”