This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.

I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed.

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.