You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

I called no one, and no one called me. I was suffocating with loneliness. The pain was almost physical. I felt like tearing myself apart. I wanted to escape from my own skin.

Ideas are powerful things requiring not a studious contemplation but an action even if it is only an inner action.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.

The wind that blows the ship that goes And the lass that loves a sailor.

The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Middle names are kind of like vice presidents: It's a fine distinction and certainly an honor, but you're never not aware that someone else got the real job.

I'm not sleeping with all the women I appear with.

Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.