26 Quotes by Carolyn See

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed--looking at headlines--that some cities emptied and some didn't. Ours didn't, not completely.

Reality is when you pay the rent. Get caught in traffic or your car breaks down. Really it's an AM/FM sort of thing. You've got reality and then there's the miraculous and the transcendent. And once you start, time stops.

Women want a family life that glitters and is stable. They don't want some lump spouse watching ice hockey in the late hours of his eighteenth beer. They want a family that is so much fun and is so smart that they look forward to Thanksgiving rather than regarding it with a shudder. That's the glitter part. The stable part is, obviously, they don't want to be one bead on a long necklace of wives. They want, just like men, fun, love, fame, money and power. And equal pay for equal work.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.

I don't believe you can buy or sell 'cool.'

'Gillespie and I' is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.