''Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.''
''In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.''
''Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.''
''Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.''
''Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.''
''To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.''
''Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.''
''Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.''
''Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.''
''There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that ... what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, ... that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.''
''Men and women, women and men. It will never work.''
''Solitude is un-American.''
''If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.''
''My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem—then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.''
''The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops—in general, doing everything men do.''
''Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.''
''A baby is a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother—how reading goes out the window and thinking too.''
''Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.''
