I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?

I don't know what's worse by number in America, the vacant houses standing, or the homeless people falling into them.

The best advice anybody could have given me was to keep getting up over and over again.

the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.

I usually don't work with other people; I do the whole show myself.

You know, I've had Botox. The woman who does it is very good, obviously. Very conservative.

Capital which overreaches for profits; labor which overreaches for wages, or a public which overreaches for bargains will all destroy such other. There is no salvation for us on that road.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.