“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

“Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life?”

“The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.”

“The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many... somethings. So, thanks.”

“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.”

“I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.”

“You'd be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.”