Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.