Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.