Quotes from Sloane Crosley

I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.

The trick to scrambled eggs is to remove half the milk from the container and shake what's left as hard as you can, like a cocktail shaker, before you whisk it into the eggs.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

I was diagnosed with a severe temporal spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills. It was official: I was a genius trapped in an idiot's body.

There's already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk - except they all apply to you, and all at once.

The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I'd write if I didn't have to worry about offending.

There's an 'Everything must go!' emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn't there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we're not 'ready?' You don't feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.

Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it.

Personal technology has given us the freedom of being able to do whatever we want - and in the case of celebrities and athletes, whomever they want. But it can also serve as a humiliation jetpack.

I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I'd live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.

Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it's all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It's what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.

When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end.

I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.

I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger.

As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.

New Yorkers have a delightfully narcissistic habit of assuming that if they're not conscious of a scene, it doesn't exist.

I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person. I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice. I tip taxi drivers so poorly I'm amazed none of them have run over my foot while speeding off.

I am starting to like L.A., but the concept of a place you have to get used to so much seems a little weird to me. I have been to many foreign cities where I didn't have to acclimatize as much as I did to L.A.

Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry.

The world I describe is about how people live now. It's not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere.

I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing.

Everyone has been in a social situation where you say something and it goes unnoticed, then someone else says the same thing and everyone laughs a lot. You learn how to be more creative and whacky and amusing.