Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

[T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictablity about the outcome.