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" As a teenager, I ached to grow up even more than I dreaded to. I craved escape from my parents' impositions on what I believed. "

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" I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. "

" I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us. "

" As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another. "

" Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price. "

" In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes. "

" Most books are three-thirds rubbish. "

" In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger - one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt. "

" I think Britain is a little better at bringing intellectuals into discourse than America, where I'm from. Though I would say, perhaps, that the U.K. prefers its intellectualism to be entertaining. "

" A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum. "

" As individuals are best off believing they control their behaviour, the judiciary is best off imputing that control - barring powerful extenuating factors such as mental illness. "

" Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling. "

" When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss. "

" Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well. "

" At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity. "

" Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity. "

" While one can't always begrudge the wealth of people who have at least produced something of value, the rich of the financial world don't make anything but more money. They're not creative, aside from, perhaps, in accounting. "

" Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields. "

" Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain. "

" In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. "

" In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it's nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar. "

" Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion. "

" As a child, I was always a sucker for anything in miniature, and it didn't have to be a dress: a desk, a Matchbox truck. Perhaps a childhood attraction to shrunken but compellingly realistic facsimiles is commonplace, if only because children themselves are compellingly realistic facsimiles of the giants who rule their world. "

" My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off. "

" Conservative supporters might either have the courage of their convictions or, if truly ashamed, revise them, but they should at least refute the proposition that defending your own interests is only acceptable if you're broke. "

" I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face down the fact that no, they are not going to be film directors, famous artists, or billionaire entrepreneurs and still come out the other side as cheerful, decent, gracious human beings. "

" Set a good example as parents, since the most convincing argument that a girl can become a computer coder is that her mother is one. "

" February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can't begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it's so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it's so great. "

" For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted. "

" I read 'The Bell Jar' as an adolescent and, like most teenagers, had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her - looks, talent, opportunity, with her 'whole life ahead of her,' yadda, yadda, yadda - yet was spiraling into misery. "

" During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination. "