There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul...

Familiarity breeds content

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Just remember that sometimes you drift into things, and then you can’t get out of them. Not to decide is to decide.

I don’t even have a dog. I tell people I’m allergic so they won’t think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of...

Here is the real domino theory – gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of...

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed to a whole raft of wits.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare...

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream,...

I think that anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

{ONLINE>AFRICAN-POWERFUL-SPELL-CASTER-LOST LOVE,CURSE-VOODOO-BLACK MAGIC-=WHITE MAGIC-REVENGE-FROM-USA-AUSTRALIA=CANADA-AFRICA-ASIA=AMSTERDAM+}1-MY STRONG BRING BACK LOST LOVE MAGICAL SPELLS the lost love of your life could be back jst in few days on their way to you. This spell does not force love...

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase “the good old days” has...

A finished person is a boring person.

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us...

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

One day she had been out walking and she had wondered whether she had become a different person in the last year,…. Then when she really thought about is she realized she’d been becoming different...

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can’t manage it.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

It’s amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn’t come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the...

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being...

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the...

I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.

In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into...

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we’re selling this deadly stuff anyway?

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you’re tired of hearing about us, you should try being one...

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can...

Well, we tell our kids things like ‘don’t gossip’ and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

“You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life …Your entire life …Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart.Not just your bank account, but your...

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.”[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit...

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Speech is the voice of the heart.