All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

If you want to do things, do things.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

The word career is a divisive word. Its a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Hindsight usually looked down upon is probably as valuable as foresight since it does include a few facts.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.

I think that the quality of all bands is steadily improving and it is a pleasant thought to me that perhaps the efforts of Sousa's Band have quickened that interest and improved that quality.

Warren Beatty took an interest in my career at one point.

Neither these statesmen nor their constituents sought in any way to use the Government for the interest of themselves or their section, or for the injury of a single member of the Confederacy.

I had given up the guitar between '75 and '78. I completely lost interest. I was sick of hearing other guitar players and I was tired of my tunes.

The government must do all it can to help reduce interest rates for business.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I have no interest in sailing around the world. Not that there is any lack of requests for me to do so.

Pakistan has made no mention of ending our tests. We have a missile program, and it is in the national interest whatever we want to do.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

And when we draw lines in the sand with regard to certain basic things that are vital to our interest and to the interest of democracy and our friends around the world, we have to be willing to back that up.