Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.

The prize I value most was given to me 60 years ago. I was named the girl with the cleanest fingernails.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it's any different.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Moonlight lined the windowsills like a fall of snow.

Love is love, and loss is loss. We all love, and we all die, and everyone suffers the pain of grieving. The trick is to enjoy what you have while you have it.

And to all the doctors and people who said there was no hope for children with progeria and they don’t live long I want to say, ‘You’re wrong.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

A gentle focus of attention is all it takes to free the body of minor imbalances.

I know what I liked as a child, and I don’t do any book that I, as a child, wouldn’t have liked.

I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom.

Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end, the more tempting the minute.

I often conduct interviews in my truck.