Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

Men after the heart of God become the moral conscience, the guidance and custodians of justice, not simply in the security of the four walls of their church

Every word she writes is a lie including and and the.

My husband, after two weeks of dating, asked me, if our relationship were to work out, would I be OK with our first boy being named Ace.

But people who do not know me are surprised to see me as a real person I guess.

Beaurocracy destroys initiative.

I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.

I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing.

If India is computer, Congress is its default program.

Power doesn't corrupt. It's neutral. Someone always wants to corrupt power. It's the way a shotgun is not a deadly weapon until someone chooses to use it irrationally.