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.

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

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

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

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.