A baby's a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.

Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.

Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.