A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. 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.

The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

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.

Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people are so thorny and so vulnerable and so easily wounded when in love.

The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable; whereas in person I am free - obviously! - to sound every which way.

Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.