That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.