Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

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

I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

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

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

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.