One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

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.