I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.

Maybe I’ll never be able to do what I hope to, but at least I have hope.

I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals."The Panopticon

In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

A servant of the Lord stands bodily before men, but mentally he is knocking at the gates of heaven with prayer.

You can take the boy out of England, but you can't take England out of the boy. And ummm, yes, I feel a huge emotional attachment to England.

Too few have the courage of my convictions.

When God has not taken away our trouble or temptation yet, with His grace in our lives, we are content.

The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.

In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.