When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.