Amanda Filipacchi

One of my greatest pleasures in life is promising myself I will not drink, or smoke, or take coke, or do heroin, or eat cookies, then doing it. It's a pleasure that can be repeated daily.

Lynn stalked. She had taken up stalking for health reasons, but it was not paying off as handsomely as she had hoped.

The intention appears to be to create a list of ‘American Novelists’ on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men.

I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another eating while reading.

His body was now very close to hers, and he dared to bring his hand under her skirt.
“Where is your underwear?” he asked.
“I lost it.”
“Where?”
“In the garden. It fell off when I was spying. I didn’t have time to retrieve it.”

For months I had been trying to be less myself.

[p]eople who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of 'American Novelists' for inspiration ... might simply use that list without thinking twice about it.

Reality is so dull, Alan thought. Any mistake in one’s perception of it is inevitably more interesting than the real thing, and lucky are those who remain uninformed of their error.

"My gift to you will be to take away your freedom of choice for a while. Freedom can be very unhealthy and unproductive. Instead, you’ll have freedom from choice.”

I bring Laura to the edge of the clapping crowd, and I watch her sink, becoming engulfed in the sea of clapter.