I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.