As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.

What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?