Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?