Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

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.

Powerlessness and silence go together.

In Shakespeare Saved My Life, [author Laura Bates] said she got better papers from [prisoners] than she got from people in her regular classes. Because she was teaching, of course, Macbeth, and a number of them had murdered people. The guy who wrote the best paper said, "You do have this, 'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' before you do it, but in my case it was a gun."