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

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

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.

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

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

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