If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.