Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Delay is not a help-mate. The cemetary is full of people who thought they could DO IT tomorrow. Do It Now!

Patience and propriety. It was the only graceful thing to do.

Sometimes, to fix something, you need to completely ruin something else

Being in love is to be half-cooked inside an eggshell called love.

Inner peace is a quiet evening moonlight walk in the soft falling snow of our minds

My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires

It has been years since I have seen anyone who could even look as if he were in love. No one's face lights up any more except for political conversation.

The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.

Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government.