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

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

There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

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.

Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know America so much better.

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

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.