The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather thanachievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.