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.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

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

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

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.

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

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