The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

Keeping a journal implies hope.

Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.