What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

If the town were a black hole, I was the helpless star being sucked into oblivion. It was an oblivion I craved.

Your muse ain't singin' on your MTV? Can't even see him on your HD TV?

In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it's evil, not good, that rushes to fill the void.

I laugh, and it sounds like I've been sucking helium.

Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Better readers are better thinkers.

There are many, many benefits to being known for whatever it is you do. To deny that would be sort of asinine and vulgar.

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

As long as a man thinks, this struggle must go on, and so long man must have some form of religion.