It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

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.

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.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

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.