Sloane Crosley's Quotes

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.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

I have certain rules that I've established for myself that took a while post-day job to figure out. Everyone says people who freelance or are writers struggle with the structure of it. I'm not allowed to check email before a certain hour. I'm not allowed to run errands during the day. I have to write a certain amount every day.

I hope to one day co-sign a lease with another person but, well, it doesn't plague me that I have yet to do so. Put it this way: I've never had to violently tug at my own pillow at 2 A.M. to get myself to stop snoring.

I love to bake, so I made vanilla bean and blueberry muffins for sick hospital children. Just kidding! All of that is true except the sick children part.

I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

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.

I think the rule of thumb should be this: if you preface a sentence about a friend with the phrase, 'I love X, but... ' more than once in any conversation, you should stop hanging out with them.

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

I use Ole Henriksen eye gel when I think of it, and go for facials when spa gift certificates appear as a professional thank-you or in a gift bag. Once ensconced in a facialist's chair, I let myself be coaxed into all sorts of treatments, because I'm there already, so why not?

I used to think that nails-down-a-chalkboard was the worst sound in the world. Then I moved on to people-eating-cereal-on-the-phone. But only this week did I stumble across the rightful winner: it's the sound of a baggage carousel coming to a grinding halt, having reunited every passenger on your flight with their luggage, except for you.

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.

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.

If I go into a sandwich shop or anywhere that features 'Today's specials' on a chalkboard more than 10 feet away, I have to ask for a printed menu. I smile at people I don't know on the street and ignore those I do. When at home, I often find myself grabbing my 'back-up' glasses to search for the better-loved pair I have left on top of my dresser.

In general, I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy.

In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker's party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.

Insomniacs tend to fall into two general categories - those who give up and those who don't. I don't. I refuse to admit defeat by turning on the light. I will not try to read or watch a movie, thank you. Productivity is a crutch of the weak.

It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.

Juice cleansing has been all the rage for some time. And I used the word 'rage' advisedly; one must push a violent flood of liquidised vegetables and fruit through one's system for at least three days in order to perform a 'cleanse.'

Let me put it this way: I don't feel as settled as I look. I think that's true of everyone, probably. Except for Beyonce and Jay-Z. I don't think they wake up and think, 'Ugh, when's it going to work out for us? Why can't we catch a break?' Aside from them, I'm pretty sure everyone's life feels a lot less intentional.

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.

My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?

Normally, I am a vocal advocate for 'looking both ways' and 'knowing the size of one's own body.' But working, socialising and simply running errands in Manhattan, means I am bound to break my own rules on occasion.

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.

Picture it in your mind's nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.

Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor's appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.

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.

Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.

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.

The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

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.

The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.

There is no such thing as a crazy dog person in New York. Are there people who are completely insane about their dogs? Hordes. But cat people may as well have whiskers and tails themselves. That's because their pets' lack of social need taps straight into our worst fears as the human inhabitants of New York.

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.

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.

There's just no concept of layering a thick-sleeved sweater under a coat in L.A. A coat is more of a gesture than a necessity. You know, in case the temperature goes down to 55 degrees.

They say it's not the snoring itself but those anxiety-packed moments in between snorts. It's the waiting for the nasal passages of the person lying beside you to strike again. And strike it always does. In the dark, almost against your will, you produce that special glare reserved for people who cannot control their own behaviour.

Unless we're talking about old-school, witchcraft-trial violence, can we please phase out the phrase 'girl crush?' While we're at it, if we can axe 'like, total girl crush' unless Total Girl Crush is the name of a fizzy soft drink, in which case I'll take two, thank you.

We've come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you've been tagged in somebody else's photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.

When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instructions. Of course, the building of the snowman was a red herring.

You can't possibly fathom the ins and outs of a prepubescent beauty treatment until you've felt the strange but exhilarating tingle of a cottage-cheese-and-Pop-Rocks facial.

I'm a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory.

Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons?

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.

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.

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

For me, nothing brings out my 'born yesterday' idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.

I can't see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people.

I don't understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.

I have a disproportionate amount of faith in the goodness of the world and that everything will actually work out okay.

I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.

I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don't really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here.

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

I write on weekends, on vacation, and, really - on deadline and on my floor. Both terrible for the back.

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.

It takes a level of creative depression to hear 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' and weep.

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

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn't a requisite part of the package.

Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

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

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