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

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.

One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.