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.

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.

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

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

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 was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.