The idea of simply trotting around the world with John, for a year or more, is obviously, what Willy Wonka would have put in a special chocolate bar for me.
Show a girl a pioneering hero—Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc—and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.
It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as u...
If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it’s never-ending summer.
I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and tak...
I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acc...
Hay una generación entera que confunde con .
For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means...
Feminism has had exactly the same problem that political correctness has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.
Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin -- I can't help but note that most of the women who hold their own with the men seem unhappy and apt to die young. Lazy, popular opinion has it...
Cynicism is like armor—it will, initially, protect you. But you cannot grow in armor; you cannot dance in armor. Cynicism restricts our growth. Cynicism is, in the end, an act of weakness. We must alw...
But the problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.
All art is someone trying to tell you something, I realize. There're thousands of people who want to talk to me, as long as I open their book or turn on their show. There are a trillion telegrams with...
A gig, I realise now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed - there is a commu...
I never wanted to be famous. It was amusing at first, but now I hate it. I just wanted to be respected by people I respect. And I wanted to be rich. It's best to get rich, then you can do what you wan...
What you are, as a teenager, is a small, silver, empty rocket. And you use loud music as fuel, and then the information in books as maps and coordinates,
Intolerable, because then I imagine you having sex and that, inevitably, makes me want to kill myself, and everyone in this family. And everyone I’ve ever met. And God. I don
Difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly.
While motherhood is an incredible vocation, it has no more inherent worth than a childless woman simply being who she is, to the utmost of her capabilities. To think otherwise betrays a belief that be...
There is a black-and-white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy, and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming...