Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally and I am very funny on a dime.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.What are brief? today and tomorrow.What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.What are deep? the ocean and truth.

Decisions create success, and the quality of your decisions will determine the quality of your life.

And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.

The parent of every great and lasting decision is a thought. Therefore, contemplate deeply and thoroughly and then execute.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

You didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

He gave Marcie a spare to the Jeep—I should park this thing in the ocean, twenty feet under.

You can make a feature that makes millions but only so many people see it. With a hit TV show, every week you'll have 16 million - 20 million people watching you.

Just keep working. I've been working hard, so just keep on doing what I've been doing.