Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

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.

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

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.

An artistic perspective will jab at you from a different angle

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

I'm the old-school, letter-writing romantic. I know it's out of style, and not a lot of women go for that these days, but that's what I go for.

You can't solve a problem as complex as inequality in one legal clause.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

The reason that men are so slow to confess their vices is because they have not yet abandoned them.

I never went to fashion school. I didn't know what a designer was. I knew I had something, but I didn't know what it was. And it could just have easily been nothing.

I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.