I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.

All I can say is that laughter is my music; I would deeply suspect an argument which hadn't laughter.

Being, I imagine, must be very simple. It is Becoming which is so messy and which I am all for.

Absolutes are absolutely dangerous.

Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat.

You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.

Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him.

good is too often allied with vulnerability and evil with power.

Any chance beats no chance.

I cannot teach -- if I teach as teaching should be I become so exhausted I nearly die, I seem to have no middle gear.

Children, who once looked to their parents for leadership, now turn to their teachers for knowledge, their peers for wisdom, and their music and televisions for entertainment.

I've had quite enough danger for a while I think. I might have some more when I'm thirteen, but definitely not before then...

Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

A woman either loves or hates: she knows no medium.

Do you realize how good you have to be to strike out 2000 times?

Someone might say that's a naïve way of looking at things now, and I would respect their opinion, but I also respect every woman's right to wearing her own individual style, including hair.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

I can't even remember when the Seventies was.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.