“It takes me about 10 years to appreciate what it is I’ve done.”

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. But a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.

The audience is the barometer of the truth.

When I sing, people shut up.

And remember, this was a president (George W. Bush) who was selected by the Supreme Court rather than the people.

They’re called ‘angels’ because they’re in heaven until the reviews come out.

My mother told me I should be a secretary, but I wanted to be an actress from when I was very young.

I go by instinct – I don’t worry about experience.

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

A large part of me is pure nebbish – plain, dull, uninteresting. There’s a more flamboyant part, too. Obviously.

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

I also have intense relationships with furniture… probably because we practically had none when I was growing up.

You don’t ask a man, ‘Do you want to be in control [of your job]?’ You assume he wants control. Why would a woman be any different?

Thank God there were a couple of people in my life who said, “Go on, go on – you can do it!

I’ve considered having my nose fixed. But I didn’t trust anyone enough. If I could do it myself with a mirror.

Why am I so famous? What am I doing right? What are the others doing wrong?

I’m not weird, just different from people who aren’t different.

Gold has worked down from Alexander’s time… When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.

So far it’s 43 books in 25 years.

It’s always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they’re about eighteen years old. If you haven’t made your points with them by then, it’s too late.

There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

I was a cheerleader for nine years.