It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Everything is meant for something in this life

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

Carvin Jones is one of the brightest young stars on the blues scene today

With the rise of America, the global balance of power shifted away from the old European powers.

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

In geometric and physical applications, it always turns out that a quantity is characterized not only by its tensor order, but also by symmetry.

White working-class voters or working-class voters have felt abandoned, have felt, in many senses, disparaged by the political leadership of America.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

I didn't know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later.