Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

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

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.

A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.

Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.

They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.