I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

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.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

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.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.