The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.