I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.