Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.

Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.

How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

Smiles are such a simple thing to give but means so much to many.

Hope as evidence of life. Life as evidence of death.

You either like me or you don't. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don't have that kinda time to convince somebody else.

It's Godlike to love man - even in his sin - merely because he's man.

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.

Look, Mother, I am never going to be thin. I'm Norwegian. If you wanted a thin daughter, you should not have married a man whose female ancestors carried cows home from the pasture

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

I'm too lazy and I like food and I like my free time too much to spend it working out!

Anything can happen; this is the very rule of this universe! The best defence against this rule is this: Don't panic!

If envy was not such a tearing thing to feel it would be the most comic of sins. It is usually, if not always, based on a complete misunderstanding of another person's situation.