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

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.

Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence.

I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

The mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above, and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

Periods of wholesome laziness, after days of energetic effort, will wonderfully tone up the mind and body.

Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.