women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

Love is the cloud that keeps raining down.

Attitude is the source of beauty, self-confidence, success and happiness.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.

Fingernails are for opening things and toenails are for storing precious minerals off the ground.

The fact that a person loves one particular person is what is important; the life lesson, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, is that you not be promiscuous, and true to one person.

She believed in letting children have a certain amount of rope, and only intervened at the last moment, in order to prevent their hanging themselves by it.

Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

That's what love does. When it's right, it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be.