To those of you who are wearing ties, I think my dad would appreciate it if you took them off.
The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.
Theories by women about women have only recently begun to appear in print. Theories by men about women are abundant.
The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality.
Poring over fragments of other people's lives, peering into their bedrooms when they don't know we're there, we thrill to the glamour and the power of secret knowledge, partly detoxified but also heightened by being shared.
Women serve as guardians of culture, upholders of society.
Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent, he often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible.
The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
If you profess to be a Christian, yet find full satisfaction in worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is false.