You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

I think all women have a friend who at some point dumped them or betrayed them or deeply disappointed them. And at the same time all women have a friend who they dumped or betrayed or hurt in some way. That's universal in women's friendships.

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.

Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.

I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.