the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.

the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.

There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

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 art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.

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

Love ... is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.