I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

My mother was an incredibly loving mother.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.