When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?
People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
When men do the dishes, it’s called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
You can get rid of the column. It’s a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you’re gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That’s both comforting and terrifying.
When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.
When hot dogs like Mr. D’Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it’s because they’re suffering from a disease. It’s called bull-imia, and it’s the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.
Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.
You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.
Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn’t read, I don’t know what I’d do. But as a writer, it’s both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.
Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
That’s what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it’s the way we are.
You’re like a cake when you’re young. You can’t rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Over the last twenty years, we’ve changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
We are awash in the revealed world.
I can’t think of a single downside to motherhood now.