One really understands testicles after reading 'The Family Jewels,' and one is gratified.

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

a letter ... changes utterly the moment it slips inside an envelope. It stops being mine. It becomes yours. What I mean is gone. What you understand is all that remains.

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

Love letters lack taste. No restraint: falling off cliffs, going up in flames.

Elinor Lipman tweets like a nightingale with an eagle eye.

Use Me is a wonderfully satisfying book.

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

Never say anything about yourself you don't want to come true

Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery.

I've never experienced chronic poverty, but I know what it's like to live on £3 a week.

Jesus Christ can't hit a golf ball straight. It's virtually impossible - at best it's an accident.

We have a costume closet at home. My family will put on a costume for any excuse.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere

Just lock myself in a room, stop answering emails, stop answering the phone and I come out with something.