Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.