My daughter emails me. When your daughter starts to email you instead of talk to you... It's horrible. You cannot forget human communication.

Never make a big decision without sleeping on it.

I think I may be a better person for having given serious time and thought and effort to gardening.

You should never accept what can be offered to you if you feel it can be improved.

The first book really was kind of an entertaining textbook for the homemaker. I couldn't find a good book about entertaining in 1982, and neither could my friend, so I decided to write it.

When I got married and had a child and went to work, my day was all day, all night. You lose your sense of balance. That was in the late '60s, '70s, women went to work, they went crazy. They thought the workplace was much more exciting than the home. They thought the family could wait. And you know what? The family can't wait. And women have now found that out. It all has to do with women, or the homemaker leaving the home and realizing that where they've gone is not as fabulous, or as rewarding, or as self-fulfilling as the balance between the workplace and the home place.

Buttons are the fossils of the sartorial world, enduring long past the garments they were designed to hold together.