Number of things happen after I was 50. One, you are hopefully secure in what you want to do - which means that you don't spend a lot of time chewing on your knuckles about your reason for being here.Also, you're at your most beautiful. No woman is ever more beautiful than she is at 50.

"Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.

Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

You never get over the fear of writing.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.