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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.

Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.

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.

One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.

I shall stick to my resolution of writing always what I think no matter whom it offends.

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.

As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.

I didn't want my epitaph to read 'Here lies John Caudwell, billionaire.' I knew that wasn't enough. I've had a charitable instinct all my life, but working gave me no time for it.

The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.