Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all.

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

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.