It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.

Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.

That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.