Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Education is the manifestation of perfection already existing in man.

Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.

Nothing perhaps is strange once you have accepted life itself the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

And I think women have come a very, very long way, but they have a long way to go.

Modesty and chastity are twins

I have written the little work that follows . . . in the role of one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and one who seeks to understand what he believes.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

I have had really positive experiences in every medium, as well as horrible experiences in every medium.

To have a 9-foot sofa in a small room can be kind of treacherous.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.