God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.

Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.