If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth.

[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

Writing is always harder than talking.

I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.

The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.

I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.