I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.