I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

-Bumblebee bat, how do you see at night?-I make a squeaky sound that bounces back from whatever it hits. I see by hearing.

Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.

I'm a big people pleaser; I had a very awkward adolescence. Part of me is still that person who wants everyone to like me.

I've never seen anyone get so excited over books before. You'd think they were diamonds.

We don't get what we want, we get what we expect.

Death is the ultimate disappointment

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

The slothful are always ready to engage in idle talk of what will be done tomorrow, and every day after.

Britney and I wore matching denim outfits [to the 2001 American Music Awards]. Yeah, another bad choice. I'd probably pay good money to get some of those pictures off the internet.

Most people forget that even in Iraq, by the time the air and no-fly zone was established, the air defence system had been removed through the first Gulf war. All of them had been neutralised.