Our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety— and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

We lose not only through death but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.

My mom says I'm her sugarplum, my mom says I'm her lamb / My mom says I'm completely perfect, just the way I am / My mom says I'm a super-special, wonderful, terrific little guy / My mom just had another baby, why?

Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive, and irrational-but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands and then eat just one of the pieces.

I had lived with my mother in anger and love - I suppose most daughters do - but my children only knew her in one way: As the lady who thought they were smarter than Albert Einstein. As the lady who thought they wrote better than William Shakespeare. As the lady who thought every picture they drew was a Rembrandt.

A rebel. That was me when I was younger. What was a rebel from New Jersey? A rebel was moving to the Village, not sleeping with top sheets, not eating a hot breakfast in the morning, not having 20 rolls of toilet paper and 10 boxes of Kleenex.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

I not only wanted to write when I was 7 and 8, but I sent stuff out when I was 7 and 8. I sent it out... and I couldn't believe that they would turn down my poems about faithful dogs.

Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.