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" I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?' "

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" I loved to read and would read anything that roused my interest, whether it was below my age level or above it, even if I could barely make sense of it. "

" It's scary to me to watch the world around us get less and less physical while in the imaginary world of pop culture, aggressive impulses and fear reactions are floridly, furiously stoked and indulged. "

" I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons. "

" When I was writing 'Bad Behavior,' I was very, very quiet. I would just sit there and listen to people. And if I was out in public, I was usually quiet, and people tended to assume I was stupid because I was a young, pretty girl who's quiet. "

" It's true that your environment influences how you write. "

" I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild. "

" I used to start at about 10 at night and work until early morning. My preferred way to work is to start in the early afternoon and work until about 3, go do errands, have dinner, and then write for a few more hours in the evening. "

" I feel I'm often misunderstood by critics. People project a lot or exaggerate the subjective fragility simply because it's frightening to them. "

" Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs. "

" Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing. "

" The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either. "

" Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially. "

" I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer. "

" The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen. "

" Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally. "

" Sometimes I decide I don't want to write because it isn't the thing for me to be doing right then, and I go do something else. "

" The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility. "

" One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings. "

" I've noticed women my age and a little younger, anywhere from 35 to 50, saying, 'Who would want to bring kids into a world like this?' Or, 'I don't want to spend my life that way. I want to do my artwork.' And they're very unapologetically stating this. "

" What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else? "

" I didn't like horses when I was a kid. "

" People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it. "

" On the rare occasions when my mother perfumed herself, she was going out, and so I rarely smelled those special scents up close on her body, except during kisses goodbye. "

" Something like riding a horse - which I've recently started doing - requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses. "

" I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support. "

" Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out. "

" The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity. "

" I think a lot of writing, or a lot of young writers, especially, hold themselves back unnecessarily because they're so upset about the idea that they might be sentimental or so concerned about being criticized that way or even being that way that they just shy away from any strong expression or emotion. "

" My first and strongest memories about perfume come from childhood, from my mother, and they are a complex blend of her private and public selves. "

" My parents had met in high school and married right after my father came back from World War II. They honeymooned in Paris and returned to that city when my father, in college on the G.I. Bill, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. "