"I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.""In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.""Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.""Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.""There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its value.""Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe, aren't even aware of.""Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.""We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?""We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.""When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.""You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever."
Goodman worked as a researcher and reporter for Newsweek magazine between 1963 and 1965, and has worked as an associate editor at the Boston Globe since 1967.
In 1998, Goodman received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.
She has compared "anthropogenic warming deniers" to Holocaust deniers.
Goodman announced her retirement in her final column, which ran on January 1, 2010.
Goodman was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She is the daughter of Jacob Holtz and Edith Weinstein Holtz, and is the sister of architecture critic and author Jane Holtz Kay. Goodman graduated (cum laude) from Radcliffe College in 1963 with a degree in modern European history. She married her first husband Anthony Goodman in 1963 and gave birth to their daughter Katie in 1968. After their divorce, she married her second husband, journalist Bob Levey in 1982.