If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

It's all about money. Sometimes it is merciful, sometimes it is magnificent and sometimes it is moderate

One of the best collaborations is between social and solitude.

Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.

Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

I'm probably not very funny. The scripts just don't come in, or the ones that do aren't that good. I suppose I'm just an old drama queen, really.

The Federal Reserve is answerable to no one.

I'm probably the only bestselling author you know who's written more books than she's read.

I'd personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it.

No doubt there is a Scandinavian wave. I guess everybody is just surfing their wave until it breaks and hoping it won't be too soon.