I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.

Instinct' usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.