Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.

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 think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.