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

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

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.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

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

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