It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.