Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

mooo," she said... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there.. whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.

But I'll tell you a secret. You know what boys like? A woman who's happy with herself. Who's not making herself miserable with the Jane Fonda videotapes and complaining all the time about whether this part or that one's too big. And you know what else they like? She leaned in close, whispering into her granddaughter's ear. Good food.

Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain?Oh, I think there might be something wrong with everyone else’s.

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.

Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was — her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth — she wasn’t the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn’t what she’d made herself out to be — a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn’t have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister.

I don't answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I'm not here and go home.

Your friends will still be your friends, if they're good friends.

I'm saying that it's a big decision. Your first love is important. It's part of your story The story you'll tell yourself, the one you'll tell about yourself, for the rest of your life.

Sometimes I wish it has been you.

First of all, it's life. You don't win.

It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.