It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

I don't look at my pension. It's not as big as yours so it doesn't take as long.

The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.

If you really want something you just hang with it. We think our future's ahead and not behind.

There is no more important issue than restoring the protection of the law to pre-natal infants.

Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.

All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

My pride had been starched by a family who assumed unlimited authority in its own affairs.

A simple equation exists between freedom and numbers: the more people, the less freedom.

We should blush for shame to show so much resentment at what is done or said against us, knowing that so many injuries and affronts have been offered to our Redeemer and the saints.