Character is better than ancestry, and personal conduct is more important than the highest parentage.
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
My life is a reading list.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
My body is an instrument for me to use.
My idea of a group decision is to look in the mirror.
We weren't trying, but we were definitely practicing - and not safely practicing.