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

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.

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.

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

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.

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