I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

Your family is unavoidable. You cannot escape them or trade them in for another family. You also can't change them... but you can change your response to them.

In your 40s, you shed those who bring you down and surround yourself with the most positive people you know.

Do you often find yourself uttering the phrase, 'I feel like I should go?' You do not need to go. You are busy that night. You are busy every night, forever.

When we are young - or even 32 - we often say 'yes' to everything because we're worried that we won't know what we'll like if we don't try it.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

I know the bestseller 'Gone Girl' doesn't need an ounce of support from me, but that book was as sharp and witty as they come.

Cooking skills aside, my mother is an exceptional nurturer.

In the wintertime I like macaroni and cheese.

Maybe I wouldn't hit three fast food restaurants in a day, but I could hit one in a day. I try not to do that.

There are a lot of great things about food, but it's something that's an eternal struggle in our contemporary society, where and how food is made, where it's coming from, how much to consume. There are so many layers to it.

My Twitter feed is probably my biggest resource of news. Other people scour the web so I do not have to, and I thank them for it.

What I try very hard to do is have an hour or so in the morning when I leave the house and don't have my phone with me. I'll go sit in a cafe and read and handwrite in my notebook and not be facing a screen. My head will be clear. I will be able to hear myself think. Because honestly for the rest of the day it's just screens, screens, screens.

An ellipsis is a giant ocean of possibilities.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

Sadly, e-mail has triggered the decline of the handwritten note; I have seen its near-disappearance in my lifetime.

For years I'd thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.

For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.

No offense to Bushwick, where all my neighbors greeted me on the street and there is a growing arts community and a curious beauty to its industrial zone, but Bushwick is no Williamsburg, even if the real estate agents would have you believe it is.

With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.

It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.

I'm from the Midwest. We like to know who our neighbors are.

I don't know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won't talk to me because I'm a woman, and the women won't talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I'm not Hasidic.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.