Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.