Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.

I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.