The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.