Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict.... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.

Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.

You get to be a certain age and you start reading stuff about the age you are, and you think, what is wrong with these people who are writing these books? Do they not have necks?

The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is sayingit is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

All that means is that it wasn't personal to you. But it was personal to me.