artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.

Humility is the daughter of truth.

The end of parenthood is implicit in its beginning: separation.

Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.

The difference between men and women is inalienable. It is not a political fact, subject to cultural definition and redefinition, but a physical verity. We do truthfully experience our lives differently because our bodies are different. It is in what we do with our experience that we are the same. We feel, absorb and examine with the same intensity, and intense experience honestly examined informs the art of both sexes equally. ... The power of imagination illuminates all human lives in common.

the knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.

I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.