The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.