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

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.

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.

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

Here’s the inevitable truth: our hearts will always find something to worship, and that will motivate how we live.

Why not live for the reaches of Heaven than strive for the depths of Hell? If in the end there is nothing- what have you lost but fear and anger and hate?

Man unlike the animal has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

What would you do if your country's welfare depended on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain.

I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself.

I know all about dreams that make you want to scream.

Nowadays, if you have a journey, albeit a simple one, you consider yourself lucky if nothing happens.

I have no regrets at all. I have done quite well for myself. I didn't have a conventional face, but I have done well, and I am proud of it.

I know that whatever power Shelby Steele has always comes out of the writing. I'm not the greatest television pundit or the best public speaker, so it's my writing that's most important.