When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.

My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

by and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.