Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.