Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
we all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.
I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.
You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.
I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.
We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
tis true that tho' People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne'er do so in Times of Tumult.
My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.
That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
I do a lot of teaching... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.
the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
I think we’re [men and women] more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!
If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.
Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.
It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.
I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.
I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.
Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.