While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theater people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil.

A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

I was always the last woman on the last down elevator as the store was closing.

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.

Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

Some enterprising youth should go from door to door on Christmas morning peddling batteries.

The exchange by e-mail is more intimate than conversation - you allow yourself to say things you otherwise wouldn't.

As I thought about that, I had to wonder: What will we know better about tomorrow? Who cares? Hindsight is useless.

Circumstances do not create the quality of your life.

After all, the true seeing is within.

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.

I treat my career like it just happened yesterday.

Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.

Being a scientist is like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.

I learned never to listen to acting teachers because they don't know what the hell they're talking about.