When nothing is sure, everything is possible..

Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even i….

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person..

I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try..

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the wor….

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom..

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or oblig….

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it..

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionabl….

I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down..

The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future ….

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their adm….

Nothing fails like failure.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it..

World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factori….

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure..

Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and….

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of ….

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations..

And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end ….

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts..