If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.

I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to be treated as an individual.

I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.

Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them.