I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

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.

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

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