To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

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

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

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."