I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

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

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.