Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along. I'm constantly changing my perspective on my own life. I see the past differently, and that's a wonderful thing.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.