I'm tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

      I can throw a fit, I'm a master at it.

      —Madonna, chameleonesque queen of chutzpah.

      The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

      The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

      Success didn't spoil me; I've always been insufferable.

      —Satirist Fran Lebowitz, an inspiration to every sarcastic smart-ass who ever got herself booted out of high school.

      Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

      It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

      The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

      —Writer Gertrude Stein, who loomed large in the avant-garde circles of her day, and larger still in the privacy of her own mind.

      Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

      —Kate Braverman, agitated author of the cult classic Lithium for Medea.

      I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.

      —Stella Adler, Methodic mentor to big screen kings Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro.

      (“If she were a character in a Greek play,” one interviewer concluded, “her flaw would be hubris.”)

      I have a horror of death; the dead are so soon forgotten. But when I die, they'll have to remember me.

      —Emily Dickinson, a poet far too singular to slip anybody's mind.

      I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

      —Margaret Fuller. The brilliant Bostonian who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a shocking exhibitionist when it came to her brain.

      The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

      —Prolific poet/prosaist May Sarton, a major menace to society.

      I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.

      If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

      —Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of America's nastiest national institutions.