As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.