All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

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

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally and I am very funny on a dime.

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.

You were born to stand out, stop trying to fit in.

Interpreting dreams for Iranians was just as much a sacrament as reading coffee cups was for Turks

Hard roads are not opened by themselves

Every decision we make - when we choose a vehicle, when we pump gas into that vehicle, when we order food - is not just a personal lifestyle choice. It's an environmental and moral choice.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

I've worked really hard, but I know people who have worked even harder but didn't have the chances I've had.

The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.

The releasing of attachment to object and certain beliefs was already indelibly written as a very necessary step in my human progress toward being.

If [Donald Trump] comes forward and if he does that, then, of course, there will be some engagement.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.