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 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.

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.

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

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

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