“It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.”

“I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn’t take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.”

“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.”

“Maybe I should, I don't know leave? Because this is starting to sound like one of those reality shows I don't want to be in. Maybe you guys want to take turns in the confessional booth.”

“There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom,” she writes in Teach Your Children Well. “Take a room full of five-year-olds and you will see creativity in all its forms positively flowing around the room. A decade later you will see these same children passively sitting at their desks, half asleep or trying to decipher what will be on the next test.”

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”