All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.

I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.