Our opinion of people depends less upon what we see in them, than upon what they make us see in ourselves
What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
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.
I'm lucky to have very good genes. My mother was so tiny she was almost bird-like, and my father was tall and lean. Both lived until their early 80s.
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
Every four weeks I go up a bra size. . . it's worth being pregnant just for the breasts.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.