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Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.
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A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
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Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
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Spring, you are a pinking shears: you cut fresh edges on the world.
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Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
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I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.
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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?
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Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
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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.
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The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
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Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
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All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
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Writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.
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I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.
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What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
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Beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
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Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
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You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.