If you want to be listened to you should put in time listening.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.

I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.

Where do dreams come from?...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.

Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?

A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated.

If your joy of life depends on something or someone, then you are not enjoying your life. You are enjoying the person or the thing.

My idea of fast food is a mallard.

Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children

You can't change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.

It's not creative unless it sells.

I'll have to put more earrings on. I bet that someone could analyze me and tell my condition by my earrings.

I take care of everybody. I'm either hugging you or making sure that you're not sick, because my backpack has every kind of medicine in it.

You can't debate satire. Either you get it or you don't.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

A home opener is always exciting, no matter if it's home or on the road.