When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.