Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.