Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.

Once you get below the floor of our personal identities, we're all connected. Perhaps that's why we can move into others' lives.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.