Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

I want to poke holes in the erroneous beliefs about what fame provides. It won't raise your self-esteem, it won't create profound connection, it's not going to heal your childhood traumas, it's only going to amplify them. You're going to be subject to a lot of criticism and praise, both of which are violent in their own ways.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.

It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.

I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.

…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.

I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.