It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

You don’t need armor if your skin is thick.You don’t need a sword if your mind is sharp.You don’t need a shield if your heart is strong.You don’t need a fortress is your soul is secure.

You never know when you're going to die, but maybe something in you does, some cellular consciousness that's aware of the cosmic countdown and starts making plans.

It's exploding bags, aerosol cans Southbound buses, Peter Pan They left it up to us again I thought you knew the drill It's kill or be killed.

To every man, even though he be a slave, the light of heaven is sweet.

What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.

I've always said that music is like literature.

I've never considered musical equipment very sacred.

These ballot initiatives remind us that America is the land where people are free to dream whatever they want, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel icky!

There's all kinds of mothers, so to use the label 'mother' and to think you really understood all that a human being is because she's a mother, is a mistake.