One man's cookbook is another woman's soft porn: there's a certain sybaritic voyeurism involved, an indulgence by proxy.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Eating, our earliest metaphor, precedes our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

A word after a word after a word is power.

A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

Others: A-M | N-Z