There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.