Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment.
It’s as if cats live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.
A woman without a man – a condition of ‘manlessness’ – is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn’t this world would end at once.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.