If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.