I wake up every day with a smile on my face.

I love my life.

Being in Hawaii, it's almost impossible not to be fit, I think.

Hawaii is a beautiful place to bring up a family.

I feel like I'm part of television history.

I mean, I do wear a wedding ring and take it off when I shoot.

I swim. I do a little bit of surfing. I would say I'm a beginner at surfing. I run. I cycle. I play a little bit of soccer.

In an ideal world, I'd love to work on something that is on par with 'Lost' or better than 'Lost.'

When I'm acting, I've always got to make it make sense to me why I do anything. Whether it's right or wrong, I've just got to believe this is the reason why I am doing this and just go with it.

To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.