I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

A loose end – that’s what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the...

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? In some ways we’re as committed to the old...

The problem… is emblematic of what hasn’t changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a...

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen’s remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though...

But it’s important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go...

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it...

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn’t mean I don’t still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers’ incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are...

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.

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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.