People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word "elderly" in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.