Great Throughts Treasury

"I am never completely cold. I don?t have writer?s block really. I do have times when I can?t get the lead and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don?t write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone?the whole point of view. I know exactly where I am going as soon as I have the lead. ? But as for being cold?as a newspaper reporter you learn that no one tolerates you if you are cold. It?s one thing you are not allowed to be. It?s not professional. You have to turn the story in. There is no room for the artist."

"I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out."

"I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

"I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve your life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it)."

"I don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it?"

"I don?t have much of a routine. I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don?t do anything. I just sort of have lunch?all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece."

"I don?t think any day is worth living without thinking about what you?re going to eat next at all times."

"I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I?m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can?t stop crying. She looks at me and says, ?You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.?"

"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech."

"I had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)"

"I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them."

"I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here?"

"I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don?t. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I?m not."

"I have to murder and dismember a crustacean."

"I hear myself saying these words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I'm really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine."

"I highly recommend having Meryl Streep play you. If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl to play you. You will feel much better."

"I know, I said, but it scares me. It reminds me of my father. I'm not your father, said Mark. Repeat after me, 'Mark Feldman is not my father.' Mark Feldman is not my father, I said. Am I fat? said Mark. No, I said. Am I bald? No. Do I smell of Dr. Scholl's foot pads? No, I said. I rest my case, said Mark."

"I look as young as a person can look given how old I am."

"I live in an apartment. I could never live anywhere but in an apartment. I love apartments because I lose everything. Apartments are horizontal, so it's much easier to find the things I lose-- such as my glasses, gloves, wallet, lipstick, book, magazine, cell phone, and credit card. The other day I actually lost a piece of cheese in my apartment."

"I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me."

"I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being."

"I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance."

"I think the hardest thing about writing is writing."

"I love that you get cold when it?s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you?re looking at me like I?m nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it?s not because I?m lonely, and it?s not because it?s New Year?s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

"I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about?and I think there are some writers who do that?but that hasn?t happened to me. I do think it?s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error."

"I thought [New York] was going to be the most magical, fraught-with-possibility place; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I?d be surrounded by people I was dying to know. And I turned out to be right."

"I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You've got mail. I hear nothing. Not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own heart. I have mail. From you."

"I think what's unexpected is that you keep reading it will happen and hearing it will happen, and then when it happens you find yourself genuinely thrilled on behalf of women."

"I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can?t believe I?m here without her.- on losing her best friend"

"I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."

"I?m saying that the right man for you might be out there right now and if you don?t grab him, someone else will, and you?ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband."

"I wish he were better at hailing taxis than I am; on the other hand, I realize that expectation is culturally conditioned, utterly foolish, has nothing to do with anything, is exactly the kind of thinking that ought to be got rid of in our society; on still another hand, having that insight into my reaction does not seem to calm my irritation."

"If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you're lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you've had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you've got them, you've really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce."

"In business, there is no such thing as synergy in the good sense of the term."

"Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

"If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is."

"In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You?re two inches shorter than you used to be. You?re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don?t work as well as they once did and you can?t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don?t have room for breakfast."

"It seemed to me that the desire to get married - which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again"

"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, They lived happily ever after and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work."

"It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together? and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home, only to no home I'd ever known. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like? magic."

"It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?"

"It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly believe that you are living at the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at."

"It was personal to me."

"Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble."

"Journalism is the greatest job. I loved it. I think it is a fantastic job. Now I kind of look back on it the way you look back on someone you were once in love with that you bump into and you think, what did I ever see in him?"

"Joan is very funny. I'm always telling her she's a fraud: Everyone thinks she's fragile and humorless, when we all know she's wildly funny ? and the last surviving member of the Donner party."

"It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much."

"Life. I mean the main thing that distracts me is the pressure to go on with one?s life. That you have to stop to have lunch with someone or you have to take the cat to the vet ?"

"Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won?t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don?t mean to be too literal about this."

"Men? I hate them. I?ve always hated them. You wonder why I always hang around with women and never with men, it?s because men do things like this."