Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We don't want privacy so much as privacy settings.
I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.
I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.
I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot.
I don't think anyone's ever accused me of too much self-love.
Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity.
Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather.
Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.
My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.
When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice.
Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs.
This whole notion that it's somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy.
In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.
We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available.
We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized.
Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing.
To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously.
I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in.
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.
It's not that I don't get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig.
I respond to about a quarter of comments. It's a good barometer of my mental health - when I'm healthy and busy, I don't read them.
Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.
I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.
Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.
Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria - unfortunately.
You don't realize how much a dog's presence defines the contours of your home until, in its absence, the walls seem to relocate themselves.
If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.
We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we're actually working hard.
Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime.
And why the hell should you do a really hard, important job that you don't want to do? That has extremely high stakes? That just blows my mind.
Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they'd rather sleep in late. It's a very visceral decision, and it's a complicated decision.
Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city's dominant chord.
I don't confess in my work because to me, that implies that you're dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.
Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't.
A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.
I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs.
For my part, if I'm working while flying, I'm often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I'm a slacker.
Being taken down a few pegs is humbling. Knowing that life is not easy or fair is humbling. Receiving a great honor - well, that would be called an honor.
It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.
Mother's Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed.
Being in the entertainment industry in L.A. is the equivalent to being in the publishing industry in New York. You don't ever have to hangout with anybody else.
I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.
As a mentor and an advocate, I've seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids - and adults, for that matter.
The right way to win is to recognize that winning isn't the end game, but rather the beginning of new opportunities - maybe even opportunities to help other people win.
Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak.
In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women.
Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end.
To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.
I've always been interested in tht notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.