Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Never ever accept 'Because You Are A Woman' as a reason for doing or not doing anything.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

To choose to write is to reject silence.

Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.

If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.

There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Privilege blinds, because it's in its nature to blind. Don't let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

Used every man according to his capacity.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

Nature had squandered an unreasonable quantity of male beauty on this undeserving creature.

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

Playing professional football is something I'll never be able to do.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech, Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose. And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

One of life's regrets is that you didn't always tell the truth, and now it's too late, because the truth has changed.

Enlightenment says the world is nothing Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion And nothing is real.