Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.