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" I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "

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" For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart. "

" If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it. "

" I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. "

" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "

" I don't trust people who are likable. "

" My husband had a stalker, briefly. "

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

" My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface. "

" I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc. "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

" Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not. "

" I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "

" Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way. "

" We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story. "

" I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world. "

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me. "

" If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible. "

" There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so. "

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.' "

" I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada. "

" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "

" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "

" Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.' "

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "