Anna Marie Quindlen (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
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.
I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.
And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.
I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.
Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. . . . Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.
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.
That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper. . . . The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.
If I waited long enough and said, "Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30?" everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way.
It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.
For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.
WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE WOMEN THAT HAVE MADE A REAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD THROUGHOUT HISTORY, WHAT THEY’VE DONE HAS ALMOST ALWAYS BEEN DEFINED BY FEARLESSNESS. STOP LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER - THERE’S NOBODY WHO MATTERS BACK THERE.
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts. . . . But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
If God is watching us, as some believers suggest, as though we were a television show and God had a lot of free time, the deity would surely be bemused by how dumbed-down devotion has sometimes become in this so-called modern era. How might an omnipotent being with the long view of history respond to those who visit the traveling exhibit of a grilled-cheese sandwich , sold on eBay, that is said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary? It certainly argues against intelligent design , or at least intelligent design in humans.
All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.