Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

Charity is a cop-out so traditionally female in its apparent self-effacement that there seems resonant comfort in it. We're no longer supposed to serve the imaginations of men who have dominated us. We are to give up ourselves instead to those whose suffering is greater than our own. Looking down is just as distorting as looking up and as dangerous in perpetuating hierarchies.

As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me, whether they affect homosexuals or men or the physically handicapped and I can't alone defeat them. They will not defeat me, either as a lesbian or a writer.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.