The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.

It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.