"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.

Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.