Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

It was the ship of dreams to everyone else.

Her family was counting on her—to be responsible, to get good grades, to follow the rules, to be the good example. And more important, she expected those things of herself.

(Remember you always have the option of taking to the sea.)

I was shy and a hard worker, so acting was a way to focus whatever nervous energy I was experiencing onto a goal.

Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, "How well he spoke" but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, "Let us march.

It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.

I've seen miracles happen with sound.

DON'T FEAR FAILURE. Fear being successful at things that don't matter

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."