When you are a strong woman, you will attract trouble. When a man feels threatened, there is always trouble.

Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud.

Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out their meaning for...

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.

Taste is one of the five senses, and the man who tells us with priggish pride that he does not care what he eats is merely boasting of his sad deficiency: he might as well be proud of being deaf or...

Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory...

Knowing how to tactfully criticize someone's work is a mentor's job.

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has...

Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don't quite fit the bill. They don't march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our...

What I love about Indiana Jones is he always bites off slightly more than he can chew. The guy he's fighting is always slightly tougher than he is, but he just refuses to give up. And that's what...

The Cause of Women is generally the Cause of Virtue.

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I...

Here are a few of the actors who have brought my novels to TV life: Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Julian Sands, Gena Rowlands, Rob Lowe, Julia Ormond, Chelsea Hobbs, Tate Donovan,...

If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.

Honest people don't hide their deeds.