When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fearlessness. That’s something I came to at a certain point; I wish I’d come to it younger. Stop looking over your shoulder — there’s nobody who matters back there.

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it.