To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

Yet it is only love which sets us free.

A woman who is convinced that she deserves to accept only the best challenges herself to give the best. Then she is living phenomenally.

There is no place where God is not.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

I believe what I have to say is important, and I believe the people coming to hear me are important, and so the occasion of itself alone has an importance, which forces me to stare down my nerves.