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I'd like my epitaph to read 'Given the amount of time she had, she did the best job she could.' Also that I'm a nice person... and a good mother.

One shouldn't write one's own epitaph. I hope people will remember me as one who did her best - and who wasn't an anachronism.

Let no man write my epitaph... When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written.

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

I haven't written my own epitaph, and I'm not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt. I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck.

Be charitable before wealth makes you covetous.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

They talked about me as if I were Mother Teresa, and that every time I get a paycheck I go and send it to poor people and that we spend every free moment helping out people less fortunate. That was an enormous exaggeration.

I didn't want to be a 'Fortune' writer who was constrained in any way.