Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

I will write myself into well-being.

people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.