Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones. - Anna Quindlen

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."

[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.