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.

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.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

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

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.