Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

If a messiah exhorts you to kill people of another belief system, get this idiot non-prophet out of your stupid system.

When they confronted her like this, she felt like a delicate freaking time bomb just waiting for a time and a place to explode.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Oh time...time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.

Life's to short for chess.

Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth.

We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.

Home life is a foreign environment for most guys. So it's natural to show them being idiots at home.