All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great.
My biggest regret in life - well, one of them - is that I wasn't muskie fishing from '92 to '96 when I was not married.
When I say, 'The choice to not marry,' that doesn't always translate into, 'I am a woman, and I am deciding that I am not going to get married,' or 'I am rejecting marriage.'
Like most Russians, I am very superstitious, and if I don't get married, I don't get divorced.
The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure.
The idea of being a single woman in Hollywood is a very peculiar thing.
A bachelor's life is no life for a single man.
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.
Singles have a purpose that is higher than any earthly relationship. Marriage is honorable, but so is being single.
Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.
Whoever, fleeing marriage and the sorrows that women cause, does not wish to wed comes to a deadly old age.
I had thought a lot about unmarried life during my years as an unmarried woman - which was all during my 20s and into my 30s. I was someone who didn't have a ton of relationships as a single person - and so I had a sharp identification with singlehood.
I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth - no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me - for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit.
If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think.
An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only half a life.
I could see myself in a white nurse's uniform, working unnoticed for many years and at last dying, unknown, unmarried and unsung.
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
I deal with unhappy marriages a lot. I've never been married, I'm single.
