When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.