Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.

The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.