“After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.”

“After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn't interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived.”

“'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.”

“As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.”

“At first blush, it seems odd that loser lit books are rejected initially, then go on to be fiercely loved by legions of readers. This apparent contradiction might be due to the fact that if they didn't screw up their lives, most losers would be the kind of power-elite, Type A go-getters whom readers love to hate.”

“'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.”

“Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.”

“Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.”

“Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.”

“Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.”

“Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn't have to make conversation.”

“Even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice.”

“Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.”

“Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.”

“Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.”

“For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.”

“Ham is undoubtedly one of the most universally beloved of meats, at least in those parts of the world where it's not prohibited.”

“I don't feel that I've had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.”

“I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them.”

“I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another.”

“I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire... Portland, Maine, felt like the inevitable place for us.”

“I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.”

“I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically.”

“I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.”

“I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.”

“I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.”

“I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.”

“I remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, 'And so it begins!'”

“I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.”

“I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.”

“I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.”

“I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.”

“I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.”

“If I fell into one relationship after another with men who were either emotionally tuned out and unavailable or hotheaded and controlling, or both, it was because I was lacking in good sense about men.”

“If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.”

“Iggy Pop has a voice that's somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous, cool, contained and bold. I don't know how he does what he does.”

“Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.”

“I'm not a foodie - I'm an eater: I'm hungry.”

“In 1990, when I had just arrived in New York City as a wet-behind-the-ears 20-something girl from Arizona, I spent a year or more working as the personal secretary and secret ghostwriter to an American-born countess in her apartment on the Upper East Side.”

“In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.”

“In literature, older women are not often given center stage.”

“In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.”

“In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.”

“It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.”

“It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.”

“It's hard for me to generalize about kids and divorce. I think every family's experience is different; some kids are devastated by it, others relieved, and so forth, no matter what generation they're from.”

“It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.”

“I've always had rock star envy. Unfortunately, writing is a pedestrian, tame occupation done while sitting in coffee-stained pajamas in front of a computer rather than prowling around a huge stage in sweaty leather pants, so I have to get my kicks vicariously.”

“I've always written about adultery because it raises the question of transgression and trouble.”

“I've cooked plenty of meals when I was sad, lonely, depressed, angry, bored, and/or under the weather. My primary aim in these circumstances is generally to cheer myself up, to fill my stomach with something warm so I can feel comforted and fed, usually just with a quick soup or an omelet.”

“I've never been an outward rebel, but inside, I just rebel deeply.”

“Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.”

“Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.”

“Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.”

“Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.”

“My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.”

“My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That's part of why I started the blog.”

“My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.”

“My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.”

“My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.”

“My youngest sister belonged to a group called the Twelve Tribes for many years. She recently left, with her husband and four children. Talking to her about her experiences in the group is fascinating, moving, and enlightening.”

“Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.”

“Now that I'm 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there's time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I'll take what I can get.”

“Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed.”

“On Halloween, kids get to assume, for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they're also allowed to take candy from strangers - the scariest thing of all.”

“Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.”

“Reminded of what a diet really is, I began eating more slowly, being more conscious of when I was full. I started to enjoy my buckwheat bread with goat cheese and pureed butternut-squash soup as a response to real hunger.”

“The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?”

“The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat.”

“The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.”

“Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.”

“There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods.”

“There's a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.”

“To eat passionately is to allow the world in.”

“To taste fully is to live fully.”

“When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.”

“Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.”

“With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.”