I believe only in art and failure.

I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.

Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.