I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough -- or I misunderstood what strength was.

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

We live in a funny time, a funny era, when desire, to be adult desire, has to be conceived as sexual. And that didn't used to be the case. Sexuality is a social construction as much as anything else and I think the realities of sexuality don't always fit into the social constructions that we have, and we live in a goal-oriented time - on all fronts.