I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

...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.

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

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.

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.