I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.

I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.

Everyone is unique and each experience is different.

There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.

Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival.

The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.