“It was a weird kind of loneliness, feeling that some of my closest friends didn’t actually know I existed.”

“He's one of my closest friends in the industry. He makes me feel like a teenager — I have to act and think like an adult so much. He makes me feel young again.”

“Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood. And yet when I was growing up, my parents always had a diversity of friends, some of whom lived different kinds of lives themselves…And they had many friends who had chosen this other path of adulthood, who weren’t married, who didn’t have children, whose lives didn’t resemble their own. So this sort of life never seemed like anything less-than to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it’s a lesser existence, a purgatory of true adulthood.”

“You're my closest friend and you're thousands of miles away.”

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go?”

“I'm not saying I'm 40. I'm 30-10. I don't feel 40. I don't know what it means. I just know that all of a sudden it's something that's in print next to my name. AND NOW SHE'S 40. It almost feels like some sort of badge of honor in a weird way.”

“In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional.”

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

“It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don't actually know.”

“As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!”