I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

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.

Rain, rain falling downDown, down on the goundAll the birds go in the treesThey don't like the rain, you see.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

Excellence is about fighting and pursuing something diligently, with a strict and determined approach to doing it right. It's okay if there are flaws in the process - it makes it more interesting.

I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

Energy doesn't come to us so much from the things around us-although we can absorb energy directly from some plants and sacred sites. Sacred energy comes from our connection to the divine inside us.

I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.

These record companies are going to be going out of business pretty soon, because people are just going to be downloading what they want to hear.

What does the frontal cortex do? Gratification postponement, executive function, long-term planning, and impulse control. Basically, it makes you do the harder thing.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.