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" Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material. "

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" I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person. "

" I think I prefer writing books because the work of art begins and ends with you - it's easier to know if you're doing it right, as opposed to writing a play and then waiting around for somebody else to complete it. "

" Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age. "

" I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling. "

" I just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed. "

" There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the supposed life cycle. "

" Writing makes everything else in my life okay; it makes everything make sense. "

" Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows. "

" Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape. "

" I wished to have the time to put together a world view, but there was never enough time, and also, those who had it seemed to have had it from a very young age; they didn't begin at forty. "

" Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture. "

" I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so 'in it,' you couldn't even call it an art; it's such embroilment. With a friendship, you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more. "

" A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. "

" Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer. "

" I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing. "

" Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else. "

" You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom. "

" When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters. "

" Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others. "

" For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic. "

" In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home. "

" Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl. "

" Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen. "

" Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions. "

" My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world. "

" People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to. "

" There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not. "

" Growing up, I never knew that Raffi turned down celebrity endorsements, TV shows, and specials and refused to make merchandise, but it makes sense given how I think about him: My memories are limited to his voice through the record player and the album covers I stared at. "

" A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too. "

" There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns. "