It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.