I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

To be the other womanis to be a seasonthat is always about to end, when the air is floweredwith jasmine and peach, and the weather day after dayis flawless, and the forecastis hurricane.

Truth, at times is just an accepted opinion

When a man that attractive licks his lips, a girl's got to look. And imagine...

...the best definition that I heard of that is that a bureaucrat is a Democrat who has a job that a Republican wants.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

Because celebrities' lives are so visible, I think it makes it look lighter than it is.

Don't concentrate on the obvious. They might want you to miss something else.

Man will never reach the Moon, regardless of all future scientific advances.

She who pays the undertaker calls the tune.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.