I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend!

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.

Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."