It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing.

For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

Women occupy, in great masses, the 'household tasks' of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.