I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

If you want to be happy, you need to set your mind on happiness.

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

I love when people write about something, I learn what I'm doing through the eyes of a good critic, positive or negative. It's still a learning experience.

I am interested in solving an unknown factor of art and an unknown factor of life.

To take the nuts from the fire with the dogges foot. [To take the nuts from the fire with the dog's foot.]

Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.

As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it.

There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

Covetousness, anger and foolishness are things to sort out well. When bad things happen in the world, if you look at them comparatively, they are not unrelated to these three things.