Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.

Power is the ability not to have to please.

If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.

The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.

We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel - as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can - then I am nothing. Let me feel guilty ... don't try to educate me ... don't protect me.

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

The greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.

I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Everyone thinks I'm this jock of a woman, but I didn't play any sports. I didn't even let my kids play baseball because I was afraid they were going to get hit by balls.

Comedy has been crossing the country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV.

And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople get ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report.

Keeping a sense of humor about life. My parents divorced when I was 8, and whenever I felt down, my mom would remind me that a sense of humor gets you through just about anything.

I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.

One major problem with any science is that people who don't know the conceptual history of their field go round re-inventing the elliptical wheel.