You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.

If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.