As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

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.

When you least expect it is when the person you always dreamt of will finally show up.

Worldliness is an inner attitude that puts self at the center of life instead of God.

All mothers breed dead children.

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

People do not want war. War springs from causes wholly outside the lives, interests, and feelings of the people.

I loved Jack Ford. I got him in his later days, and he was a total tyrant and a total autocrat and an Irish drunk. But I had a great time.

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans; coy looks, with heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth