When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.