If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority