I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.

We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.

I think it is a good thing to have woman friends at every stage of life. We confide in each other, we support each other, we understand each other most of the time. Of course, sometimes we are competitive or angry or distant, too. But I do think it is important not to let the main friendships slip away in the sweep of the days.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.