What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn't begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.