Motherhood has no firm curriculum, but it can make you mechanically minded, and it can connect you firmly to physical life. - Hortense Calisher

I think you write better about women if you don’t write about women exclusively. As with any subject.

I think all artists, even the great ones, are combinations of arrogance and innocence. As life goes on we may lose one or the other in some proportion. To function best one must have both. Once I began to write, though, I learned that the ambition can only phrase itself in the book. There’s such an enormous difference in the writer being, and the writer doing.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.