It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.