That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.

I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.

Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.