The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.