More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

Better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry about money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean.

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.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

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.